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On a humid Monday morning in Lagos, as the city groans to life beneath the weight of its own dysfunction, it begins, with a shrug and a workaround.
At a government office, citizens wait out long queues under plastic canopies, many holding the secret weapon of Nigerian efficiency: a “connect” on the inside. Just around the corner, a pharmacist powers up a diesel generator, bracing for yet another day of national improvisation. Here, success is measured not by systems that work, but by how creatively one navigates their failure.
This is the Nigeria many know and love and endure. A country of brilliant improvisers, where every inefficiency has a workaround, every dead end an unspoken shortcut. But underneath this culture of adaptation lies a quieter tragedy: a withering of shared belief in the nation as a collective project. The state is not where Nigerians turn for order, it is what they learn to route around. And that daily detour, practiced for decades, has birthed not just a coping mechanism but a civic philosophy: the country is to be survived, not shaped.
A Nation of Improv
From the earliest days of independence, Nigerians have been made to navigate broken infrastructure with extraordinary ingenuity. In the absence of reliable electricity, backup generators became standard. In the absence of water, boreholes emerged. In the absence of justice, people turned either to godfathers, or to traditional systems like juju. The result is a republic where resilience stands in for basic rights, and citizens build lives not through systems, but around them.
In many ways, this improvisational brilliance is a source of pride. It fuels the entrepreneurial hustle that powers everything from Nollywood to fintech. It keeps buses moving, food markets open, schools functioning, barely. However, as years stretch into decades, a more dangerous pattern sets in. When a workaround becomes default, dysfunction becomes permanent.
The Culture of Adjustment
To “manage” is a verb with deep cultural weight in Nigeria. It does not simply mean to endure; it means to innovate under constraint. Yet, this adaptability, while necessary, often morphs into complicity. Broken systems are tolerated because they are workaround-able. Power cuts don’t shock anyone. Neither do missing salaries or empty dispensaries. The system underperforms so consistently that improvisation becomes the true civic operating manual.
This attitude seeps into public life. Why advocate for police reform when you can avoid harassment by speaking English with a foreign accent? Why demand transparent governance when you can “know someone”? The workaround becomes both shield and sedative, a personal fix that obscures collective failure.
The Aesthetic of Endurance
There is also a quiet sanctification of hardship. Phrases like “God will provide,” “we go survive,” and “e go better” are more than expressions of hope, they are coping mechanisms, spiritual guardrails in a country where institutions routinely fail. Over time, they form a kind of moral script: one where endurance is not just necessary, but noble. To question suffering becomes impolite; to challenge it, unspiritual.
In many churches and mosques, the gospel of personal breakthrough often eclipses the call for collective accountability.Salvation, yes, is personal. However, should faith be privatized too? When prayers replace pressure and personal piety takes precedence over public reform, the moral energy of religion is redirected inward. The state may falter, but the faithful are urged to fast, pray harder, endure: not organize, not agitate, not demand. The result is a society where pain is moralized, and structural injustice disappears into spiritual vocabulary.
Notwithstanding, endurance without expectation quietly corrodes. It teaches people to adjust, not aspire. It shifts energy from reform to resignation. It turns citizenship into a waiting room: always in motion, always “managing,” always hoping to escape, but rarely grounded enough to insist on transformation. And without that insistence, nothing lasting can be built.
Historical Roots, Cultural Ramifications
Nigeria’s workaround instinct has deep roots. Under colonial rule, institutions were designed to extract, not serve. The state was not built to work for its people; it was built to manage them. After independence, the newly indigenous elite inherited this logic. They kept the bureaucratic shell but emptied it of service. The people responded in kind: if the state would not deliver, they would look after themselves.
Over time, this created a feedback loop. The more citizens opted out of the state, the less pressure there was for it to function. Civil servants moonlighted. Public schools decayed. Local government offices became ghost institutions. In response, Nigerians turned to churches, ethnic associations, and individual hustle to meet their needs.
This orientation toward survival over structure stands in contrast to civic cultures elsewhere that emphasize collective responsibility and the public good. In countries where citizens routinely pay taxes and expect functioning infrastructure in return, accountability becomes culturally ingrained. In Nigeria, where the state has often been absent, the instinct is not to demand better service but to find a way around it. This difference is not about moral superiority, but about historical experience. Nigeria’s inherited institutional fragility bred a different kind of social contract.
When Everyone Hacks the System
Today, the workaround is no longer just a tool, it is a worldview. It affects how people relate to the nation itself. The country becomes not a shared project but a territory to be navigated, outwitted, even exploited. Citizenship becomes transactional. The question is no longer “How do we build?” but “How do I escape?”
The consequences are profound. Without a shared expectation of functional public life, there can be no national ethos. National pride becomes performative. Civic trust withers. Corruption becomes ambient: not just in leadership, but in everyday life. From university admissions to job interviews to pension queues, everyone is looking for a shortcut, because no one expects the system to work.
Toward a Culture of Expectation
This is not a call to discard resilience, but to refine it. The spirit that powers the workaround can also power reform. However, that shift requires a new civic imagination: one that sees the nation not as a broken machine to hack, but as a common home to mend.
That begins with language. To say “we dey manage” is to concede the point. What if, instead, we said “we deserve more”, and acted like it? What if resilience was not measured by how much dysfunction we can absorb, but by how little we are willing to tolerate?
It requires a reeducation of the civic imagination: through curriculum, comedy, pulpits, music, and media, that public services are not favours to be begged for, but rights to be expected. That government offices are not personal estates of those who occupy them, but extensions of the people’s will. Also, that laws are not symbolic, but binding. Taxes are not donations to the powerful, but investments in shared infrastructure. That dignity in Nigeria cannot be left to divine intervention or personal hustle alone: it must be designed, enforced, and institutionalized.
Above all, it means refusing the easy seduction of adjustment when justice is what’s needed.
The republic of adjustment has served its time. The nation Nigeria needs now must be built not on hacks, but on hope. Not on improvisation, but on insistence. Because until we stop managing our way around the system, we will never build one that manages for us all.
Eyesan Toritseju is a Lagos-based strategist and cultural commentator. In his writing, especially through his column, Cosmopolitan Nigeria, he examines how African societies confront the legacies of their past while reimagining identity, influence, and progress in the present.
