Every four years, Nigerians go to the polls looking for a messiah. Not a president, not a governor, not a local government chairman —a messiah. Someone who will fix the roads, bring light, lower prices, create jobs, cure corruption, and somehow make garri affordable again. All at once. Preferably within the first 100 days.
And every four years, we are disappointed. Shocked, even. As if the last ten electoral cycles did not teach us anything. I am not saying the government does not matter. It matters enormously.
But there is a dangerous gap between what the government should do, what the government can do, and what Nigerians expect the government to do. And that gap is where our collective frustration lives.
So let us have an honest conversation: can the government solve all our issues? Should it even try?
The Nigerian Messiah Complex
We have a peculiar relationship with government in Nigeria. We simultaneously despise it and depend on it completely. We curse the governor on Twitter and then write him a letter begging for school fees. We call politicians thieves, then queue up at their houses for “stomach infrastructure” during elections.
This is the Messiah Complex at work. The belief that somewhere out there, there is a leader who, if only they could get into power, would transform Nigeria overnight. Tinubu will do it. Obi will do it. Atiku will do it. Insert-name-here will do it.
Nobody is doing it. Not because they are all individually terrible (though some are), but because the expectation itself is impossible. No single human, no single administration, can fix a country with 200 million people, 36 states, 774 local governments, hundreds of ethnic groups, decades of infrastructure neglect, institutional decay, and a culture that treats public office as a personal ATM.
The Messiah Complex is not just naive. It is actively harmful. It encourages passivity. If the government is supposed to fix everything, then your role as a citizen is simply to wait, complain, and vote every four years.
You do not organize your community. You do not maintain your street. You do not build parallel systems. You just wait for the saviour who never comes. Our streets have failed, created wealth through corruption, and took a lot from the society we have.
Where we differ is there is no real debate about whether the government should do more. The overwhelming demand, the overconsumption of government promises, and the lack of proper systems and due process all combine to create the illusion that more government is always the answer.
What Government Should Do (And Cannot Escape)
Let me be clear. There are things that only the government can and should do. As an entrepreneur, I am all too aware of the costs of government failures in my business. These crucial services are non-negotiable, and no amount of “self-reliance” rhetoric changes this.
- Security: The government has a monopoly on legitimate force. Only the government can maintain an army, a police force, and a justice system. When Boko Haram attacks or bandits kidnap, it is the government’s job to respond. Private security guards are not and (will never be) a substitute for a functioning military and police.
- Rule of law and justice: Courts, laws, contract enforcement, property rights —these are the bedrock of any functioning society. Without them, you cannot have commerce, investment, or social order. Nigeria’s judiciary is slow, underfunded, and sometimes corrupt, but the answer is fixing it, not replacing it with vigilante justice.
- Public health infrastructure: Epidemic management system, clean water, immunization programs etc require the coordinating power and scale that only the government can provide. COVID-19 showed us that even wealthy countries struggle without government-led public health responses.
- Basic infrastructure: Roads, bridges, ports, power transmission (not distribution, which can be privatized, as we have seen). These are natural monopolies or public goods that the private sector will not provide at scale because the returns are too long-term or too diffuse.
- Regulation: Someone has to ensure that the food you eat is safe, that the building you live in meets codes, that the drugs you take are not fake, that businesses do not pollute freely. Regulation is unglamorous but essential.
These are the government’s core functions. The problem in Nigeria is not that the government tries to do these things. The problem is that it fails spectacularly at them while simultaneously trying to do a hundred other things it has no business doing.
What Government Should Not Do (But Tries Anyway)
Here is where it gets controversial. The Nigerian government has a long history of inserting itself into areas where it has no comparative advantage, usually with disastrous results.
- Price controls: Every few years, the government decides that the solution to high prices is to fix them by decree. Price controls on cement, on rice, on petrol. And every time, the result is the same: shortages, black markets, and eventual abandonment of the policy.
The fuel subsidy, which cost Nigeria over N4 trillion in 2022 alone, is the mother of all price control disasters. Instead of letting the market price signal direct investment into refining capacity, we spent decades subsidizing consumption of imported fuel, enriching a cartel of importers, and starving the economy of resources for health, education, and infrastructure.
- Running businesses: The Nigerian government owns airlines, refineries, steel mills, hotels, fertilizer plants, and a bewildering array of commercial enterprises. Almost all of them lose money. Ajaokuta Steel, which has consumed over $8 billion in investment over 40 years, has never produced a single commercial ton of steel. Nigeria Airways collapsed under the weight of government mismanagement. The Kaduna and Port Harcourt refineries have been “under rehabilitation” for longer than some of their employees have been alive.
- Micromanaging the economy: The CBN under previous administrations tried to control everything from exchange rates to who could import what. The result was a parallel market where the real exchange rate was double the official rate, capital flight, and a collapse of foreign investment.
- Welfare distribution through intermediaries: Government palliative programs, which sound good on paper, are routinely captured by politicians and their cronies. N-Power, TraderMoni, and other various “empowerment” schemes have failed to meet the needs of the people they were supposed to benefit.
The government is terrible at targeting, terrible at distribution, and terrible at verification.
The common thread in all these failures is that the government tried to be a market actor instead of a market enabler. The government should create the conditions for economic activity —stable rules, fair enforcement, sound infrastructure not try to be the economy itself.
The Private Sector Gap
Now, some of you are thinking: “If the government steps back, the private sector will fill the gap.” And in many areas, that is true. Nigerian entrepreneurs are among the most resilient and creative in the world.
We build fintech platforms that bypass broken banking infrastructure. We create logistics networks that work despite terrible roads. We generate our own electricity. We dig our own boreholes. We are, in many ways, already running a parallel economy.
But the private sector has its own limits, especially in Nigeria.
- The private sector will not build roads in rural Yobe. There is no return on investment in infrastructure for communities that cannot pay.
- The private sector will not police your neighborhood for free. Private security is available, yes, but only for those who can afford it. The poor are left to fend for themselves.
- The private sector will not provide universal primary education. Private schools serve those who can pay, which means millions of children in rural communities and in urban slums are left out.
- The private sector will not fund basic research. No Nigerian company is going to invest in a malaria vaccine because the people who need it most cannot pay for it.
This is the fundamental tension: the government is terrible at delivering services, but the private sector will not deliver them to everyone. There are market failures that only the government can address, and there are government failures that only markets can correct. The answer is not more government or less government. It is better government in its lane, and more space for private enterprise in theirs.
Self-Reliance in a Failed State
Let me tell you a story. In my estate in Lagos, we got tired of waiting for the government to fix our road. It had been bad for three years. We wrote letters. We called the local government. We tagged the governor on Twitter. Nothing happened.
So we taxed ourselves. Every household contributed. We hired a contractor. We fixed the road. Cost us about ₦15 million collectively. It has lasted longer than most government roads, probably because we supervised the contractor ourselves instead of letting someone’s cousin do it with substandard materials.
This is self-reliance in a failing state. And it is happening all over Nigeria.
- Estate associations fund their own security, streetlights, waste disposal, and road maintenance.
- Community health workers in rural areas provide basic healthcare where government clinics have been abandoned.
- Vigilante groups (like the Amotekun in the Southwest or the Civilian JTF in the Northeast) fill the security vacuum left by overstretched police.
- Churches, mosques, and NGOs run schools, hospitals, and social support programs that often outperform government equivalents.
- Business associations in markets and commercial areas self-regulate, settle disputes, and maintain infrastructure.
This is not ideal. It creates a two-tier society where the wealthy can buy their way out of government failure while the poor suffer. But it is the pragmatic response to a government that collects taxes and delivers almost nothing in return.
If you treat the government like a service provider, you have purchasing power to ask: why am I paying this much? We fight billions and “trillions” in allocation and think it means capacity, but the government is the most inefficient operation on earth.
By the time money filters through its necessary layers (leakages and bureaucracy), the purchasing power of ₦1 billion is eroded to maybe ₦200 million of actual service delivery.
Lessons From Elsewhere: Minimal States and Welfare States
How do other countries handle this tension between government and private initiative?
- Singapore: A city-state of 6 million people that is ruthlessly efficient. The government is heavily involved in housing (80% of Singaporeans live in government-built HDB flats), healthcare (through the Medisave/Medishield system), and education. But it runs these programs like a business: performance-measured, cost-conscious, and corruption-intolerant. The key is not that Singapore’s government does less. It does more than most but it does it competently.
- UAE (Dubai): A minimal-state model for citizens. Low taxes, heavy investment in infrastructure, and a government that sees itself as a platform for private enterprise. But this model is funded by oil wealth and a massive non-citizen labor force. Not easily replicable.
- Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark): High taxes, comprehensive welfare states. The government provides healthcare, education, pensions, unemployment insurance, and more. But these are countries with populations of 5-10 million, high social trust, low corruption, and centuries of institutional development. Nigeria is none of these things.
- Rwanda: Perhaps the most relevant comparison. A country that emerged from genocide in 1994 and has since built a remarkably efficient government under President Kagame. Rwanda ranks consistently among the best in Africa for ease of doing business, digital governance, and anti-corruption. But its model involves a level of top-down control that raises serious questions about democratic freedoms.
There is no perfect model for Nigeria to copy. But the lesson from all of these is that the quality of government matters more than the quantity. A small, efficient, accountable government that does its core functions well is infinitely better than a bloated, corrupt government that tries to do everything and fails at all of it.
The Middle Ground
So here is my answer to the question: Can and should the government solve all issues?
Can it? No. Absolutely not. Not in Nigeria, not anywhere. Government is a blunt instrument. It is good at setting rules, providing security, building large-scale infrastructure, and redistributing resources. It is terrible at running businesses, picking winners, distributing welfare efficiently, and responding to local, granular needs.
Should it try? Only within its competence. The government should focus ruthlessly on its core functions: security, rule of law, basic infrastructure, regulation, and a social safety net for the most vulnerable. Everything else should be devolved —to states, to local governments, to communities, to the private sector, to civil society.
What should you do? Stop waiting for the messiah. If your street has no security light, contribute and fix it. If your drainage is blocked, organize your neighbors and clear it. If your children’s school is failing, supplement with online learning or community tutoring. If you can afford solar, go solar. Build your own infrastructure.
It is the Enshittification Principle again. A business degrades its output when it has a captive audience and no competition. The government is the ultimate monopoly. Only strong opposition, active citizenry, and parallel systems keep it in check.
Government incompetence in Nigeria is a feature of the environment, not a bug. It is a systemic outcome of weak institutions, misaligned incentives, and decades of decay. The best course of action is to assume they will not solve it, and optimize for a life of self-sufficiency where possible while still demanding accountability, still voting, still pushing for reform.
You can be the citizen who builds despite the system. Or you can be the one who waits for a saviour that is never coming. The choice is with you.
May 25, 2026
8 minute
Isreal Oyarinde
Can and Should the Government Solve All Issues?
Table of Contents
Every four years, Nigerians go to the polls looking for a messiah. Not a president, not a governor, not a local government chairman —a messiah. Someone who will fix the roads, bring light, lower prices, create jobs, cure corruption, and somehow make garri affordable again. All at once. Preferably within the first 100 days.
And every four years, we are disappointed. Shocked, even. As if the last ten electoral cycles did not teach us anything. I am not saying the government does not matter. It matters enormously.
But there is a dangerous gap between what the government should do, what the government can do, and what Nigerians expect the government to do. And that gap is where our collective frustration lives.
So let us have an honest conversation: can the government solve all our issues? Should it even try?
The Nigerian Messiah Complex
We have a peculiar relationship with government in Nigeria. We simultaneously despise it and depend on it completely. We curse the governor on Twitter and then write him a letter begging for school fees. We call politicians thieves, then queue up at their houses for “stomach infrastructure” during elections.
This is the Messiah Complex at work. The belief that somewhere out there, there is a leader who, if only they could get into power, would transform Nigeria overnight. Tinubu will do it. Obi will do it. Atiku will do it. Insert-name-here will do it.
Nobody is doing it. Not because they are all individually terrible (though some are), but because the expectation itself is impossible. No single human, no single administration, can fix a country with 200 million people, 36 states, 774 local governments, hundreds of ethnic groups, decades of infrastructure neglect, institutional decay, and a culture that treats public office as a personal ATM.
The Messiah Complex is not just naive. It is actively harmful. It encourages passivity. If the government is supposed to fix everything, then your role as a citizen is simply to wait, complain, and vote every four years.
You do not organize your community. You do not maintain your street. You do not build parallel systems. You just wait for the saviour who never comes. Our streets have failed, created wealth through corruption, and took a lot from the society we have.
Where we differ is there is no real debate about whether the government should do more. The overwhelming demand, the overconsumption of government promises, and the lack of proper systems and due process all combine to create the illusion that more government is always the answer.
What Government Should Do (And Cannot Escape)
Let me be clear. There are things that only the government can and should do. As an entrepreneur, I am all too aware of the costs of government failures in my business. These crucial services are non-negotiable, and no amount of “self-reliance” rhetoric changes this.
These are the government’s core functions. The problem in Nigeria is not that the government tries to do these things. The problem is that it fails spectacularly at them while simultaneously trying to do a hundred other things it has no business doing.
What Government Should Not Do (But Tries Anyway)
Here is where it gets controversial. The Nigerian government has a long history of inserting itself into areas where it has no comparative advantage, usually with disastrous results.
The fuel subsidy, which cost Nigeria over N4 trillion in 2022 alone, is the mother of all price control disasters. Instead of letting the market price signal direct investment into refining capacity, we spent decades subsidizing consumption of imported fuel, enriching a cartel of importers, and starving the economy of resources for health, education, and infrastructure.
The government is terrible at targeting, terrible at distribution, and terrible at verification.
The common thread in all these failures is that the government tried to be a market actor instead of a market enabler. The government should create the conditions for economic activity —stable rules, fair enforcement, sound infrastructure not try to be the economy itself.
The Private Sector Gap
Now, some of you are thinking: “If the government steps back, the private sector will fill the gap.” And in many areas, that is true. Nigerian entrepreneurs are among the most resilient and creative in the world.
We build fintech platforms that bypass broken banking infrastructure. We create logistics networks that work despite terrible roads. We generate our own electricity. We dig our own boreholes. We are, in many ways, already running a parallel economy.
But the private sector has its own limits, especially in Nigeria.
This is the fundamental tension: the government is terrible at delivering services, but the private sector will not deliver them to everyone. There are market failures that only the government can address, and there are government failures that only markets can correct. The answer is not more government or less government. It is better government in its lane, and more space for private enterprise in theirs.
Self-Reliance in a Failed State
Let me tell you a story. In my estate in Lagos, we got tired of waiting for the government to fix our road. It had been bad for three years. We wrote letters. We called the local government. We tagged the governor on Twitter. Nothing happened.
So we taxed ourselves. Every household contributed. We hired a contractor. We fixed the road. Cost us about ₦15 million collectively. It has lasted longer than most government roads, probably because we supervised the contractor ourselves instead of letting someone’s cousin do it with substandard materials.
This is self-reliance in a failing state. And it is happening all over Nigeria.
This is not ideal. It creates a two-tier society where the wealthy can buy their way out of government failure while the poor suffer. But it is the pragmatic response to a government that collects taxes and delivers almost nothing in return.
If you treat the government like a service provider, you have purchasing power to ask: why am I paying this much? We fight billions and “trillions” in allocation and think it means capacity, but the government is the most inefficient operation on earth.
By the time money filters through its necessary layers (leakages and bureaucracy), the purchasing power of ₦1 billion is eroded to maybe ₦200 million of actual service delivery.
Lessons From Elsewhere: Minimal States and Welfare States
How do other countries handle this tension between government and private initiative?
There is no perfect model for Nigeria to copy. But the lesson from all of these is that the quality of government matters more than the quantity. A small, efficient, accountable government that does its core functions well is infinitely better than a bloated, corrupt government that tries to do everything and fails at all of it.
The Middle Ground
So here is my answer to the question: Can and should the government solve all issues?
Can it? No. Absolutely not. Not in Nigeria, not anywhere. Government is a blunt instrument. It is good at setting rules, providing security, building large-scale infrastructure, and redistributing resources. It is terrible at running businesses, picking winners, distributing welfare efficiently, and responding to local, granular needs.
Should it try? Only within its competence. The government should focus ruthlessly on its core functions: security, rule of law, basic infrastructure, regulation, and a social safety net for the most vulnerable. Everything else should be devolved —to states, to local governments, to communities, to the private sector, to civil society.
What should you do? Stop waiting for the messiah. If your street has no security light, contribute and fix it. If your drainage is blocked, organize your neighbors and clear it. If your children’s school is failing, supplement with online learning or community tutoring. If you can afford solar, go solar. Build your own infrastructure.
It is the Enshittification Principle again. A business degrades its output when it has a captive audience and no competition. The government is the ultimate monopoly. Only strong opposition, active citizenry, and parallel systems keep it in check.
Government incompetence in Nigeria is a feature of the environment, not a bug. It is a systemic outcome of weak institutions, misaligned incentives, and decades of decay. The best course of action is to assume they will not solve it, and optimize for a life of self-sufficiency where possible while still demanding accountability, still voting, still pushing for reform.
You can be the citizen who builds despite the system. Or you can be the one who waits for a saviour that is never coming. The choice is with you.
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Nigerian businesses are particularly vulnerable to phishing because of low levels of cybersecurity awareness among employees, the widespread use of personal email accounts and devices for work purposes, and the general culture of clicking on links and opening attachments without verifying their legitimacy. I have only highlighted the above as they are the most common forms of cyberattacks targeting businesses. There are other examples of cyber attacks targeting businesses such as Supply Chain Attacks, and SQL Injection & Zero-Day Exploit among others. Why Small and Medium Businesses Are the Most Vulnerable There is a dangerous misconception that cybercriminals only target large corporations because that is where the big money is. This could not be further from the truth. Small and medium-sized businesses are disproportionately targeted by cybercriminals precisely because they tend to have weaker security defences, less cybersecurity awareness, and fewer resources for incident response and recovery. A cybercriminal might not be able to steal a billion naira from a single business, but they can steal ten million naira each from a hundred small businesses with a fraction of the effort it would take to breach a major bank or telecom company. According to Kaspersky, 86% of small and medium sized businesses encountered cybersecurity incidents over the past year. The average cost of a cyber attack for a small business is often enough to threaten the viability of the entire enterprise. In the Nigerian context, where most businesses operate with thin profit margins, limited cash reserves, and no cyber insurance, a single significant cyber attack can be an extinction-level event forcing the business to close permanently because it simply cannot absorb the financial loss or recover from the operational disruption. The vulnerability of Nigerian SMEs is compounded by several factors that are specific to the Nigerian business environment. First, most Nigerian SMEs do not have dedicated IT staff, let alone cybersecurity specialists. Technology decisions are often made by the business owner or a generalist office manager who may have basic computer skills but no expertise in cybersecurity. Second, the rapid digitization of Nigerian businesses driven by mobile payments, online banking, e-commerce, cloud computing, and social media marketing has dramatically expanded the attack surface for cybercriminals without a corresponding increase in security awareness and investment. A small business owner who used to operate entirely in cash and paper now has a POS terminal, a mobile banking app, an Instagram business account, a WhatsApp business number, and a cloud-based accounting system, each of which represents a potential entry point for cybercriminals. Third, the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) culture that is prevalent in many small Nigerian businesses creates significant security risks because employees are accessing sensitive business data and systems from personal phones and laptops that may be infected with malware, connected to unsecured public Wi-Fi networks, or shared with family members and friends. The Human Factor: Your Employees Are Your Biggest Security Vulnerability Cybersecurity professionals have a saying: humans are the weakest link in the security chain, and this is especially true in the Nigerian context where cybersecurity awareness and training are virtually non-existent in most organizations. Think about how many times a day your employees click on links in emails without checking where they lead, open attachments from unknown senders, use the same password for their personal email, their bank account, and their work systems, share sensitive business information over WhatsApp without encryption, connect to public Wi-Fi at hotels, airports, and coffee shops while accessing company systems, and leave their laptops unlocked and unattended in public spaces. Each of these behaviours represents a potential security breach waiting to happen, and in an organization with dozens or hundreds of employees all engaging in these risky behaviours simultaneously, it is only