Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
STATE HOUSE BLOWS ₦10 MILLION ON TWO IRONS FOR SHETTIMA’S OFFICE. There is a particular kind of audacity that only Nigerian government officials seem to possess. It is the audacity of waste dressed in procurement language, of looting wrapped in the language of official expenditure, of national robbery explained away as routine government business. And once again, the State House has delivered a fresh exhibit.
The Tinubu administration’s State House has reportedly spent the sum of ten million naira on the purchase of just two pressing irons for the office of Vice President Kashim Shettima. Two pressing irons. Ten million naira. In a country where the minimum wage debate was a national crisis not long ago. In a country where public hospitals have no drugs, where classrooms have no roofs, where families cook with firewood because cooking gas has become a luxury.
Let that number settle in your mind. Ten million naira for two pressing irons.A pressing iron, for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar, is the household appliance used to smooth out wrinkles from clothes. It is an item you can walk into any market in Lagos, Abuja, Kano, or Port Harcourt and purchase for anywhere between five thousand and fifty thousand naira, depending on the brand and quality. Even the most premium, industrial-grade pressing iron from a European luxury brand would struggle to justify a price tag beyond a few hundred thousand naira. Yet the State House procurement machinery has looked Nigerians in the face and submitted ten million naira for two of them.
This is not a clerical error. This is not a misprint. This is the Nigerian government operating exactly as it has always operated — as a machine engineered to siphon public funds through every available opening, no matter how small or how ridiculous the justification.
What makes this particular case especially insulting is the timing. Nigeria is in the middle of a cost-of-living emergency. Ordinary citizens are cutting meals, skipping medications, and pulling children out of school because the economy has been squeezed dry. The naira has lost historic value. Fuel prices have made transportation a burden. And the people managing this crisis are billing the nation ten million naira for pressing irons.Vice President Shettima’s office, one must assume, requires very smooth shirts. The kind of smoothness that only a five-million-naira pressing iron can apparently deliver.
This is the governance Nigerians are living under. This is where the taxes go. This is where the oil money disappears. Not into roads, not into hospitals, not into schools — but into procurement scandals so brazen they would be comical if the consequences were not so deadly serious for millions of suffering Nigerians.
Those responsible for approving this purchase must be named, questioned, and held accountable. The National Assembly must demand a full breakdown of this expenditure. Anti-corruption agencies, if they retain any genuine independence at all, must investigate.
But beyond the investigation that will likely never come and the accountability that this administration has shown no appetite for, Nigerians must continue to document every one of these scandals. Because when history is written, the receipts will matter. And ten million naira pressing irons will be part of this administration’s permanent record.
