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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June 16, 2026
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The Nigerian Data Problem: We Don’t Know How Many We Are, Where We Live, or What We Earn
In God we trust, all others bring data. – W. Edwards Deming In 2023, I was working on a business plan for a client who wanted to launch a logistics company in Kano State. Simple enough, right? Except it wasn’t. We needed basic data. The population of Kano metropolitan area, number of registered businesses, average household income, road network coverage, number of delivery addresses and that is where it became a nightmare. You would think this information would be readily available for the most populous state in Nigeria. You would be wrong. The population figure we found ranged from 9 million to 16 million depending on which source you used. The Natonal Bureau of Statistics had one number, the state government had another. The UN population estimates had a third. The World Bank used yet another figure. And the last actual census was in 2006, nearly two decades ago, when the Kano population was counted at about 9.4 million. In a state growing at maybe 3 percent annually, the current population could be anything. We were literally guessing and our guesses were not even informed by any reliable data. The number of registered businesses? No comprehensive database exists. Average household income? The NBS does household surveys, but the sample sizes are small, the methodology is questionable, and the data is years out of date by the time it is published. Road network coverage? I called three different agencies and got three completely different answers. Number of delivery addresses? Nigeria does not have a functional address system. Most streets in Kano do not have names. Most houses do not have numbers. How do you run a delivery company in a country where you cannot describe where people live? That experience crystallized something I had been thinking about for years. Nigeria does not have a data problem, Nigeria has a data crisis. We are running a country of over 200 million people essentially blind. We do not know how many we are. We do not know where we live. We do not know what we earn. We do not know what we produce. We do not know what we consume. And because we do not know any of this, every policy decision is a guess, every budget is fiction, and every business projection is built on vibes and In Sha Allah. This is not a minor administrative inconvenience. This is a fundamental governance failure that affects every aspect of Nigerian life, from healthcare to education to infrastructure to security. You cannot solve problems you cannot measure. You cannot allocate resources to populations you cannot count. You cannot plan for a future you cannot model. And yet here we are, the giant of Africa, stumbling around in the dark because we refuse to turn on the light. The Census Catastrophe Let us start with the most basic data point of all. How many Nigerians are there? The honest answer is nobody knows. Nigeria’s last census was in 2006. It counted 140 million people, a number that was immediately controversial. Northern states claimed they were undercounted. Southern states claimed the north was overcounted. Ethnic groups accused each other of inflating numbers for political advantage. The census became not a statistical exercise but a political weapon, because in Nigeria, population determines revenue allocation, political representation, and power. The 2006 census itself was riddled with problems. Enumerators were poorly trained. Some areas were inaccessible due to security concerns. The technology was outdated. There were widespread allegations of manipulation. The results were challenged in court by several states. And yet, nearly twenty years later, this deeply flawed count remains the official basis for planning in Africa largest economy. The World Bank and the UN use projections based on this flawed baseline, which means their estimates are also unreliable. A new census has been planned, postponed, replanned, and re-postponed multiple times. The National Population Commission has been promising a new census for over a decade. Each time, the exercise is derailed by political disagreements, funding shortfalls, or security concerns. Meanwhile, the gap between our population estimates and reality grows wider every year. Are we 210 million? 220 million? 230 million? Nobody can say with confidence, and the margin of error is not a few percentage points but potentially tens of millions of people. The political dimension of the census cannot be overstated. In Nigeria, population is money and power. Federal revenue allocation is partly based on population. States with larger populations get more money. The number of House of Representatives seats is based on population. So every census becomes a high-stakes political battle. Until we can decouple the census from resource allocation, or find some way to make the count politically neutral, we will continue to fight over numbers instead of collecting them. NBS and the Methodology Problem The National Bureau of Statistics is supposed to be the authoritative source of data on the Nigerian economy and society. In fairness, the NBS does important work with limited resources. But the limitations are severe, and they undermine the reliability of virtually everything the NBS publishes. Take the unemployment figure for example. For years, the NBS reported Nigeria’s unemployment rate as being in the low single digits, which was laughable to anyone who had walked through any Nigerian city and seen the armies of young people with nothing to do. The problem was methodological. The NBS was using the International Labour Organization definition of unemployment, which counted anyone who had done even one hour of work in the past week as employed. A man who washed one car for two hundred naira on a Saturday was classified as employed. A woman who sold three sachets of pure water on a Monday was employed. The definition bore no relationship to the reality of Nigerian labour markets. Eventually, the NBS adopted a broader measure that better captured underemployment and disguised unemployment, and suddenly the combined unemployment and underemployment rate jumped to over 33 percent. The economy had not changed. The measurement
May 25, 2026
Isreal Oyarinde
Can and Should the Government Solve All Issues?
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
May 25, 2026
Isreal Oyarinde
How to Develop a Growth Mindset in a Country That Rewards Survival Over Ambition
I grew up in a household where the highest compliment anyone could give you was that you were ‘sharp.’ Not intelligent, not hardworking, not creative —sharp. Being sharp in the Nigerian context meant you knew how to navigate difficult situations, avoid trouble, and squeeze something out of nothing. Sharpness was the supreme virtue because sharpness kept you alive, and in a country where systems fail regularly and institutions cannot be trusted to protect you, staying ahead economically, physically, and socially was the primary objective. Nobody talked about the growth mindset. The conversation was always about today. How to survive today; how to eat today; how to pay rent today. And I understand why. Why the Growth Mindset is the Most Important Skill You Will Build When your daily existence is a series of obstacles that require all your energy and ingenuity just to survive, thinking about personal growth feels like a luxury you cannot afford. But the truth is that the survival mindset, while necessary and even admirable, is also a trap. It keeps you alive but it also keeps you exactly where you are. It is like treading water, you do not drown, but you do not go anywhere either. The growth mindset is what takes you somewhere, and developing it in a country like Nigeria is one of the most important and most difficult things you will ever do. Understanding the Survival Mindset and Why Nigeria Breeds It Before we talk about growth mindset, we need to understand what we are working against. The survival mindset is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to an irrational environment. When you live in a country where inflation can wipe out your savings overnight; where your employer can owe you six months of salary without consequence; where a medical emergency can bankrupt your entire extended family; and where the government’s primary function seems to be extracting resources from citizens rather than providing essential services, the first instinct you develop is survival. When this is your reality, of course you develop a short-term, defensive, risk-averse orientation. You focus on immediate returns because the future is uncertain and long-term investments feel like gambling. You prioritize social capital over genuine connections because knowing the right people, being connected, being ‘plugged in’ is the ultimate strategy in a country where formal institutions do not work. All of these make perfect sense as a survival strategy, and I would never criticize anyone for adopting it. I have seen instances where patients are turned away from public hospitals because “there are no beds”, yet one phone call to the right person could make a bedspace materialise. Personal relationships are the only reliable safety net where institutions are unforgivably weak. But I want you to understand that while the survival mindset keeps you safe, it also keeps you small. It prevents you from taking the calculated risks that lead to breakthrough growth. It prevents you from investing in skills and knowledge that pay off over years rather than weeks. It prevents you from building businesses and institutions that create lasting value. Ẹni tí ó bá bẹ̀rù ojúbọ a lọ sí ọjà —he who fears the shrine goes to the market instead. But the market of survival only offers subsistence, not abundance. The Nigerian environment actively punishes growth-oriented behavior in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The formal financial system offers savings rates that are consistently below inflation, which means that saving money in a Nigerian bank is actually losing money in real terms. And if you decide to start a legitimate business, barriers to entry are so formidable that many people conclude that hustling and trading are more rational strategies than building formal enterprises. I have watched brilliant, ambitious young Nigerians get beaten down by this environment until they abandon their dreams and settle for survival. Not because they lacked talent or drive, but because the system made growth so difficult and survival so all-consuming that there was simply no space left for aspiration. This is the real tragedy of the Nigerian survival mindset. It is not that people choose survival over growth, it is that the system gives them no other viable choice. What Growth Mindset Actually Means if You Are a Young Nigerian The term ‘growth mindset’ was popularised by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University, and it refers to the belief that your abilities, intelligence, and talents can be developed through effort, learning, and persistence, as opposed to a ‘fixed mindset,’ which assumes that these qualities are innate and unchangeable. In the Nigerian context, I want to expand this definition beyond individual psychology to include a set of practical orientations that enable long-term growth despite environmental obstacles. A Nigerian growth mindset includes the belief that you can improve through learning and effort, but it also includes the strategic patience to invest in long-term outcomes, the courage to take calculated risks in an uncertain environment, the discipline to resist the social pressure for immediate consumption, and the resilience to persist through setbacks that would crush most people. It is not about being naively optimistic or ignoring the very real obstacles that Nigerian life presents. It is about choosing to invest in your future even when the present is demanding all your attention, and doing so in a way that is smart, strategic, and grounded in reality. This is hard. I am not going to pretend it is easy. But it is the only path I know that leads from where you are to where you want to be. Rewiring Your Relationship with Failure and Risk One of the most crippling aspects of the survival mindset is its relationship with failure and risk. In survival mode, failure is catastrophic because you have no safety net. If your one income source fails, you cannot eat. If your small business collapses, you cannot pay rent. If you invest your savings and lose them, there is no social security system to catch you. This fear of failure