By Dr Charles Obiajulu Ugwu.
There is a sound a structure makes before it collapses. It is not loud. It is not dramatic. It is a faint protest metal tired of pretending it is still strong, concrete remembering every shortcut taken during construction. Those who live inside such structures rarely notice. Life goes on. Radios play. Markets open. Jokes are cracked. But the sound is there, audible only to those who have learned to listen beneath noise.
Nigeria is making that sound.
This is not a prophecy. It is an observation. And it is offered not as condemnation, but as counsel, urgent, unromantic, and unflattering. Nations, like people, do not collapse because they are cursed. They collapse because they ignore what they already know.
“Before the curtain falls” is not a metaphor borrowed for drama. It is a final interval. The short, unforgiving stretch of time when exposure is still optional, when repair is still cheaper than ruin, when truth however painful still has leverage. After that, events take over. Systems stop negotiating. Reality stops waiting.
Nigeria is not yet collapsing. But it is standing at the edge where pretending becomes more expensive than change.
The danger of this moment lies in its familiarity. Nigerians have become experts at surviving dysfunction. Power outages no longer provoke outrage; they provoke backup plans. Currency instability no longer shocks; it is priced into everyday life. Insecurity is discussed the way weather used to be—unpleasant, unpredictable, but strangely accepted. This is not resilience. It is adaptive numbness. And numbness is what allows decay to proceed without resistance.
There was a time when failure arrived as a scandal. Now it arrives as a memo.
Consider how small betrayals have become routine. A public office holder lies openly, not to deceive everyone knows but to signal immunity. A policy is announced with confidence, knowing it will not be implemented, only defended. Budgets are passed like rituals, detached from outcomes, unanchored to lived reality. Courts issue judgments that sound correct but land wrong. Elections occur, but participation shrinks not because people don’t care, but because they no longer believe care matters.
This is how legitimacy erodes: not with explosions, but with yawns.
Every nation approaching the edge tells itself a comforting story that things have always been bad, and somehow the country survived. That story is half true, which makes it dangerous. Nigeria has endured hardship before, yes. But endurance is not the same as immunity. Systems do not fail because they have suffered too much; they fail because they have learned the wrong lessons from suffering.
One of those lessons is that consequences are negotiable.
When fuel queues stretch for weeks and no one resigns, a message is sent. When universities shut down for months and nothing structurally changes, another message is sent. When citizens die in preventable circumstances and investigations dissolve into silence, the message becomes clear: pain is tolerated, accountability is optional.
Over time, the nation internalizes this logic. Citizens stop asking what is right and begin calculating what is survivable. Institutions stop asking what is just and begin managing what is defensible. Leadership becomes performance, not stewardship. And eventually, even performance deteriorates, because there is no longer an audience that believes the play.
This is the curtain trembling.
The most misunderstood aspect of national collapse is timing. People imagine a single moment a coup, a war, a dramatic announcement. In reality, collapse is a process that becomes visible only at the end. By the time it looks obvious, it is already irreversible. The real danger zone is earlier, when warning signs are plentiful but still ignorable.
Nigeria is there now.
You see it in the way young people speak about leaving, not as ambition, but as escape. Not “I want to explore,” but “I cannot build here.” A nation hemorrhaging its most capable minds is not experiencing migration; it is experiencing a vote of no confidence. And no amount of patriotic rhetoric can offset arithmetic. When those who should be investing their future withdraw it instead, the future notices.
You see it in the informalization of everything. Security outsourced to vigilantes. Power outsourced to generators. Education outsourced to private tutors. Healthcare outsourced to prayer, travel, or luck. The state recedes quietly, not through policy, but through absence. Citizens adapt. Adaptation is praised. But what is really happening is substitution: people building private solutions to public failure. This works until it doesn’t. Because not everyone can substitute. And when enough people are excluded, pressure builds.
History is ruthless on this point.
There is a reason nations rarely collapse from the top down. They collapse from the middle out. When professionals teachers, doctors, engineers, civil servants lose faith that effort will be rewarded, ethics will be protected, and rules will be applied consistently, they disengage internally long before they resign physically. They show up, but they withdraw belief. That withdrawal is invisible until suddenly nothing works.
Nigeria’s middle is tired.
Not lazy. Not unpatriotic. Tired of explaining obvious truths to deaf systems. Tired of competence being treated as a threat. Tired of integrity being punished as naïveté. When a society teaches its most functional members that survival requires moral compromise, it is not being realistic. It is liquidating its future.
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is the illusion of motion. There are plans. Agendas. Reforms. Committees. Summits. But motion without direction is not progress; it is exhaustion. Nigerians are weary not because nothing is happening, but because too much is happening without coherence, credibility, or consequence.
A nation does not need more slogans at this stage. It needs alignment between word and deed so tight it hurts.
The question Nigeria must confront before the curtain falls is not whether it has problems. That question insults intelligence. The real question is whether it still believes in repair, or whether it has quietly accepted managed decline as destiny.
Because here is the uncomfortable truth: collapse is rarely imposed. It is permitted.
It is permitted when theft is reframed as smartness. When cruelty is excused as toughness. When incompetence is protected by tribe, faith, or familiarity. When citizens outsource responsibility upward while leaders outsource blame downward. When everyone is offended, but no one is accountable.
Advice at this stage cannot be gentle.
To leadership: legitimacy is not inherited from office; it is borrowed daily from the governed. Every decision that ignores lived reality shortens the loan period. Power hoarded in a failing system does not make you strong; it makes you the final custodian of blame.
To institutions: neutrality in the face of decay is not professionalism. It is abdication. Systems that refuse to self-correct eventually get corrected violently by history, by revolt, or by irrelevance.
To citizens: cynicism is understandable, but it is not harmless. Mocking everything feels like intelligence, but it trains the soul to expect nothing. A nation where belief has collapsed will soon discover that survival requires more than jokes and endurance.
This is not a call for blind hope. Hope without action is narcotic. This is a call for uncomfortable honesty. For naming rot without romance. For choosing repair while choice still exists.
Because once the curtain falls, advice becomes eulogy.
Nigeria still has time not much, but some. Time to re-anchor institutions to consequence. Time to make corruption expensive again. Time to restore dignity to work and seriousness to leadership. Time to prove, not proclaim, that citizenship is not a sentence but a shared project.
But time, unlike patience, does not renew itself.
History is already leaning forward. The audience is restless. The props are shaking. What remains is a narrow window in which the actors can abandon pretense and rewrite the final act.
This is that moment.
Listen closely. The structure is speaking.
Author: Dr. Charles Obiajulu Ugwu
Dr. Charles Obiajulu Ugwu is a management consultant, adaptability thought leader, and regenerative systems expert. With decades of experience advising leaders, institutions, and governments across Africa and globally, he is known for his contrarian clarity, deep systems thinking, and unapologetic interrogation of power, legitimacy, and human resilience.
