We talk, shout, say the same things over and over, we know we need to pay attention - but we don’t. Why this deafness to our own alarm bell?
Nigeria is governed by three desires: greed, envy, and the most undignified of the three, fear. All our politicking, our hustling, our frantic japa-ing all flow from these three springs. Even the quality we are most often praised for - our famous ambition, our ingenuity, the "drive" that foreign visitors never stop remarking on - it is not at all clear that any of it is really ours.
We may simply be the greediest, the most bitter, and (above all, and least flatteringly) the most fearful people alive. Which, to be fair, is not by itself a catastrophe; every civilization on earth is moved to some degree by these same urges. The feelings are universal; it is what we do with them that differs.
We have individually brilliant people, but together, we lack a culture of brilliance. Why do we not meaningfully gather into a collective? Why does our fear not push us into the protective huddle that fear, in other places, has always known how to build?
The great empires and civilisations in history all figured out how to harness greed and fear, yoke them like stubborn oxen, and deploy them into systems that protected the whole. America is, first and above all, an idea - the country is a mere scaffolding built around the idea. Great Britain, at the height of her imperial self-regard, was held up by the celestial conviction that she had been chosen to rule the earth. I lived for a while in China - a civilisation that reinvented itself inside forty years - and what I saw there was a grassroots, almost devotional belief in a shared national project. Our own mythology, by contrast, begins and ends at our compound gate.
The 2027 elections are here, and there’s much ado about it, but politics will not rescue Nigeria. It is an old truth that every people get the leaders they deserve, and Nigeria has the leaders we’ve all earned. Pick a random handful of everyday Nigerians from any street in Lagos or Onitsha or Kano, shuffle them, deal them out as rulers, and you will arrive, with mathematical certainty, at the same type of leaders we have always produced. Our leadership is the average of the collective risen to the top.
Even Nigerians do not trust Nigerians. You scarcely can employ a Nigerian without a permanent crick in your neck from looking over your own shoulder. I have hired, in the last decade, somewhere near 400 people in Nigeria; of these, at least 3 in every 10 have either stolen from me outright or broken their contracts by moonlighting on my time - running, from the seat of my payroll, a second and sometimes a third livelihood.
And the sickness is not limited to the salaried. I recently hired a plumber to fix a modestly leaking joint in the roof of my Lagos house; four hours after he left, my upper floor was under two feet of water. I can say, with certainty, that I did not have two feet of water on that floor when I called him. To his credit, I could now swim on the first floor - which is more than most Lagosians can say of their own homes.
You can count on the average Nigerian to leave any object, any premises, any institution, worse than he met it. So, this is not some special disease of the political class; it is now - and I say this with reluctance - Nigerian culture.
Once upon a reasonable time, a good education was the bridge by which a young person crossed into a bearable future. You immersed yourself in a pool of equally ambitious peers, built an identity in their company, graduated into the civil service or the private sector, started a family, and passed on a set of values to your children. It was never exactly easy; but for those with grit and ambition, the path was straightforward. And because the path was straightforward, grit and ambition grew in abundance.
But now, that bargain has been dismantled. What remains is a country full of people with ferocious ambition and nothing to apply it to. No real industry, limited enterprise, and certainly no public service worth the name. Worse, there are no moral guardrails on ambition. That’s pitiful.
Nigeria must become a society in which the average person can flourish. We are asking far too much of our young - demanding from every teenager the cunning of a serpent and the stamina of a mule. Young Nigerians are now starting families later. Poverty, greed and the ensuing aimlessness midwifing this delay.
I confess that I’m worried about the children being born into this country right now. I worry that our generation of parents lacks both the skill and the moral steadiness to raise a generation capable of the rescue. I’m worried that the infrastructure of demonic intelligence that afflicts Nigeria continues to improve at a rate more exponential than we have solutions for. Above all, I worry that most of the young people of this generation will never once, in the full span of their lives, meet themselves at their full potential.
The spirit of the young Nigerian has been amputated.
What then rescues us?
For any society to be worth the name, each member must have a reasonable path to economic dignity, and the whole must be held together by shared moral responsibility. The state can help with the former; the latter can only be summoned by the society itself. Three things
First: a new moral order. We must de-throne money. That shining idol, sitting at the centre of every Nigerian shrine, public and private, must be pulled down from its throne. I’m not advocating for its banishment, that would be both impossible and foolish, but we must relocate it. Reduce it to a tool, stripped of its current status as the measure of the worth of a human life.
Second: young Nigerians must be paid more money. A great many of the problems we experience will shrink if young Nigerians had any real measure of economic dignity. They would start families earlier; take out mortgages; support their relatives; start small businesses; take on social responsibilities; look after their communities - because they would belong. And people who belong are far less likely to become thieves, bandits, kidnappers, illegal emigrants, idle loiterers, catcallers, bloodthirsty herdsmen, drunkards, drug addicts, homeless, prostitutes, ballot-box snatching thugs, gamblers, ritualists, area boys, bitter incels, unfaithful spouses, misogynists, misanthropes, moonlighters, incompetents, fraudsters, pedophiles, absent parents, violent police officers - and did I say ballot box snatching thugs? Maybe I mention them twice because, in the accounting of our national miseries, they have earned compound interest.
I don't want to oversimplify the complexity of this money problem, but two things are immediately doable.
The labor market needs to pay young people more. At our top twenty companies, salaries as a share of revenue sit at around 7%. Seven per cent - and that includes senior leadership. By comparison, American firms pay out two to five times more to their employees. I will grant the obvious caveat: our enterprise giants cluster in capital-heavy sectors (oil, cement, telecoms), whereas the American comparisons lean toward the labour-heavy (retail, healthcare, logistics). However, the figures below are still grotesque:
~40–55% of Nigerians under 30 are unemployed or underemployed. This almost certainly understates the reality, since the National Bureau of Statistics, in its generosity, counts as "employed" anyone who has one hour of paid work in any given week.
85% of Nigerians earn below N100,000 monthly, and only 2.4% of Nigerians earn above N200,000 monthly.
The minimum wage (which 80% of the population doesn’t reach) only covers 5% of living expenses in Lagos.
In 2026! This means that there is no hope in hell for a young Nigerian to ever own property, to raise a family, to educate the children of that family, or to rest from labour for so much as a single undisturbed afternoon.
- The cost of living, in step, must come down - on three fronts especially: rent, food, transport. Nigeria offers the world one of its stranger paradoxes: at once the poverty capital of the planet (a trophy we’ve won from the Brookings Institution) and, in the person of Lagos, the third most expensive city on earth relative to local income (Numbeo's).
And this is not work for corporations or the government alone. If you personally employ a cook, a gardener, a driver; if you buy from the hawker at your window or the woman who braids your hair - pay them well. In that tiny corner of society where you are president, how are your citizens faring? What will they say of your reign when they go to sleep at night? We are all, each of us, running a small republic of one kind or another. The question is whether ours is the sort of republic a citizen would willingly stay in, or the sort they would cross a desert to flee. A culture that rewards people is built by every small sovereign deciding, in the privacy of his own little kingdom, that the people in it will eat.
Third: we must allow - and indeed encourage - young people to do the work they love. I clearly remember the pleasure of competing with my schoolmates as a boy, and later as a university debater; I saw brilliance then in its wild state, unbroken, still crackling with its own electricity. Yet nearly all those brilliant companions of mine had the brilliance wrung out of them, in time, by the grinding need to chase money. The fault was not theirs.
I find myself constantly wondering what kind of country this might become if we allowed our remarkably gifted young people to follow their real interests, however odd, however unpromising those interests might look to their guardians. If we reduce every human being to an economic-pursuit machine - and I use the phrase deliberately, because that is exactly what we have been manufacturing - how richly has the experiment rewarded us? Let us look at the harvest and be honest about its taste.
From a very young and impressionable age, Nigerian children are told to choose careers based on projected financial return. Their innocence is taken from them early. They are recast as vehicles for the delivery of future earnings, and it is precisely here - at this early initiation - that the seeds of the kleptomania we later lament are planted. A child is told: if you study this, in ten years you will afford rent, and maybe a car, and you will not be a disgrace to the family name. The child swallows the threat and begins to labour against a future debt they never took. They are chasing the shadow of a creditor who does not exist.
It is hardly surprising, then, that on reaching any position of proximity to resources, such a person pillages and plunders. They steal from their employer, drain the state coffers, enter romantic relationships with people double their age - all out of fear. Fear of a ghostly future that was drummed into them as teenagers. And greed is just fear wearing its shopping clothes.
We will not amount to much as a society if we have not first produced individuals who are alive - individuals striving, in their own names and on their own terms, toward the good. I remember my first visit to San Francisco, and the shock of noticing how much self-belief the young there seemed to carry around with them. It just made sense.
If you are lucky enough to be a steward of young people - as a parent, aunt, uncle, cleric, or employer - your sacred task is to help them discover what they are great at, to support them through the long apprenticeship of sharpening it, and to hold them accountable to their love of it over the years. Or, failing that, to perform the second-best act of stewardship available to you:
Get out of their way.