Nigeria, March 22 -- No one in Nigeria was surprised that on a day we woke up to suicide bombings, suffocating heat, high fuel prices, and widespread darkness worsened by inflation, President Bola Tinubu chose to travel to the United Kingdom to attend a 'royal fanfare.' This is the deeper problem Nigeria faces: a leadership detached from lived reality, and a growing divide between those who govern and those who endure the consequences.

Suicide bombings, once emblematic of the peak years of Boko Haram's insurgency, are reappearing in the North-East through coordinated attacks on civilians, while terrorists take advantage of weak territorial control to attack military bases, disappear into forests, and return with greater force, creating a...