TDFrom childhood, I imagined Nigeria becoming a nation like the United States — ordered, ambitious, disciplined, and united by a shared commitment to the common good. I dreamed of becoming one of those who would help turn it into a promised land.
That dream shaped my decisions. I studied the countries I admired. I traveled to learn what they did right — what institutions they built, what values they enforced, what standards they refused to compromise — believing we too could do the same.
It was only in adulthood, living the daily realities of Nigeria, that I began to understand why that transformation has proven so elusive.
Nigeria is not failing. It is functioning exactly as designed.
What appears to be collapse is, in truth, a system calibrated to protect power without responsibility. This is not a temporary crisis. It is the normalization of consequence-free authority.
The divisions between Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, and the many other nationalities are real. The tensions between Christians and Muslims are undeniable. But these fractures alone do not make a country ungovernable. Many diverse societies coexist and prosper.
What makes Nigeria different is how those divisions are cultivated, weaponized, and managed for power.
Nigeria operates as a no-man’s land — a carefully maintained vacuum where institutions exist in form but not in substance.
Laws are written yet selectively obeyed. Offices are occupied yet structurally hollow. Authority is exercised without duty, and failure circulates freely as leadership.
Corruption is not the disease. It is the bloodstream.
What is often described as “state weakness” is, for those who benefit, a stable arrangement. Disorder generates profit. Ambiguity shields theft. Impunity becomes inheritance. The system does not malfunction; it rewards those who understand its logic.
Ethnicity and religion are not merely social fractures — they are governance instruments. They fragment collective anger and redirect scrutiny.
While citizens argue over tribe and creed, elite networks consolidate access to oil rents, public contracts, judicial insulation, and political protection.
Rage is divided. Power is unified. Reform has become ritual language. But reform assumes a shared commitment to responsibility.
You cannot reform a vacuum. You cannot repair a structure whose endurance depends on evading accountability.
Nigeria survives not because it works, but because it pays those who manage its instability.
The deeper complication lies beyond its borders. A disciplined, accountable Nigeria would renegotiate extraction, enforce regulatory seriousness, and disturb entrenched global interests.
A no-man’s land is easier to transact with. Vast wealth flows outward while domestic elites — North and South alike — are compensated sufficiently to preserve silence.
Thus the arrangement persists. Nowhere is this more visible than within the justice system. The architecture of law stands, but its moral authority has thinned.
Buildings age. Basic infrastructure decays. Informal transactions creep into formal spaces. The symbolism is painful: a republic that demands obedience but cannot guarantee dignity within its highest institutions.
When courts lose sanctity, citizens lose psychological anchor. Yet, this condition is not destiny. It is design.
The question before Nigerians is no longer whether the country can be “saved” through cosmetic reform.
The real question is whether there is collective courage to dismantle a profitable vacuum and replace it with a state where power answers to law, and law answers to principle.
Ending a no-man’s land is not an election cycle.
It is reconstruction.
Reconstruction is costly. It demands sacrifice from those who benefit and endurance from those who suffer. It requires discipline greater than outrage and unity stronger than manipulation.
Nigeria will not collapse from chaos. It will endure indefinitely in managed disorder — unless Nigerians decide that survival without dignity is no longer acceptable.
A country is not built by complaint. It is built by consequence. The choice remains open.
