WHEN NIGERIA WORKS – THISDAYLIVE

Most Nigerians have no idea what a Nigeria that works would look like. When they do, they often are not conscious of their part in its making. There is a version of Nigeria that does not require the sudden emergence of a generation of perfect leaders, or the overnight transformation of a political culture built over decades of incentivised dysfunction. It does not require oil prices to behave, the dollar to weaken, or any of the other external conditions Nigerians have learned to wait for as preconditions for progress. It requires something more modest and more demanding at the same time: a country where the basic systems work well enough that ordinary people can build extraordinary lives.

Start with the simplest thing. A Nigerian who wakes up in the morning should be able to turn on a light. Not because the government has solved electricity as a concept, but because the regulatory and market structures around power have been fixed sufficiently that private investment has filled the gap the public sector could not and never should have tried to fix. This is what happened in telecoms. In 2000, making a phone call in Nigeria was an exercise in frustration and luck. A privilege. Today, over 200 million lines are active and a Lagos street trader processes mobile payments without thinking about it. Nobody declared a national telecommunications miracle. The government created a framework, stepped back far enough to let competition work, and the market did the rest. Electricity is harder, the infrastructure more capital-intensive, the legacy problems more entrenched. But the template exists. A Nigeria that works is one where that template has been applied.

Consider what a functional Nigeria means for a small business owner in Aba. She makes shoes. Nigerian-made shoes that can compete on quality with anything imported, if she can produce at scale, get them to market reliably, and access credit at rates that do not make expansion a losing proposition before it begins. The bank does not require collateral she does not have in exchange for capital she needs. The port does not add three weeks and a bribe to every shipment. None of these fixes require genius. They require sustained institutional attention, the kind that compounds over years rather than cycles with election seasons.

A Nigeria that works is not a Nigeria without poverty. It is a Nigeria where poverty is not the permanent inheritance of geography. A child born in Zamfara today faces a set of life outcomes that are structurally different from a child born in Lagos, not because of talent, not because of character, but because of where the investment has gone and where it has not. A functional Nigeria does not eliminate that gap overnight. It narrows it deliberately, year by year, through education infrastructure that reaches the farthest of villages, healthcare delivery that does not stop at the end of a tarmac road, and security conditions that allow a farmer in Benue to plant and harvest without calculating the odds of surviving both.

The security piece is not separable from the economic piece. They are the same argument. An investor looking at Nigeria’s agricultural potential is also looking at the farmer-herder conflict maps, the banditry corridors, the kidnapping statistics. A Nigeria that works has not necessarily solved every dimension of its security challenge. But it has created enough stability in enough places that economic activity is no longer being held hostage to armed groups. Kaduna’s recent experience, complicated and incomplete as it is, points at the direction. Progress is possible. It is slow, it is non-linear, and it requires a level of political patience that Nigerian governance has historically struggled to sustain past the next election cycle.

Which brings us to what a functional Nigeria would feel like for its people, especially in the texture of daily life.

It feels like a parent enrolling a child in a public school without the quiet resignation that this is the best they can do. It feels like a middle-class family not keeping a generator budget that rivals the down payment on a small apartment. It feels like a graduate applying for a job and understanding that merit is at least one of the criteria by which it will be filled. None of these are utopian demands. They are the baseline expectations of citizens in countries that have decided to function. Nigeria has the resources, the talent, and in flashes the institutional capacity to meet them. The question has never been whether it can. The question has always been whether it will.

The government’s role in this is not to do everything. It is to do its specific things well, and to stop doing the things it does badly that prevent others from doing their own things well. Regulate without strangling. Invest in the infrastructure that no private actor will build because the returns are too long and the risks too high. Enforce contracts. Collect taxes fairly and spend them transparently. Hold institutions accountable to their mandates. There are no ribbon-cutting ceremonies for a functional judiciary or a consistent power supply. But they are the assignments on which everything else depends, and they are the ones Nigerian governments have most consistently avoided in favour of the visible and the symbolic.

The people’s role is harder to articulate because it is less bounded. But it begins with the same decision the government must make; the decision to hold the long view. A Nigeria that works is not built in one administration or demanded in one protest cycle. It is built in the daily choices of citizens who pay their taxes, who refuse the bribe even when it is cheaper to pay it, who hold their representatives accountable between elections and not only during them.

Nigeria has all the ingredients. It always has. Our country is not short of capacity. It is short of the collective decision that capacity deserves a system worthy of it. That decision is available. It has always been. The only question is when enough people make it at the same time.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing