OPENING THOUGHTS
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
Some essays arrive fully formed, urgent, with a title already burning in your mind. Others take years to gather. This one is the second kind. It has lived with me for a long time – in notebook margins, in voice notes recorded in Third Mainland Bridge traffic while radio callers complained about fuel and electricity, in dinner conversations with friends in government, journalism, and hospitals that began with “Have you noticed…” and ended in silence. It has lived in the moments when the generator hums, the lights flicker, and the country feels like a riddle that changes shape every time I think I have solved it. The first thing I want to say is this: Nigeria is not a place you understand all at once. It is a place you learn to live with.
I did not set out to write a grand theory of Nigeria. I am not sure one is possible. The country is too large – bigger than France and Germany combined, with hundreds of languages. It is too contradictory – billionaires in private jets while children die of malnutrition, oil wealth beside extreme poverty, corporate headquarters a few kilometres from slums without drainage. What I have are sketches: observations, memories, stories, questions. Some are painful, like the displaced mother who had lost count of how many times…
This project began years ago, though I did not know it then. It began the first time I watched a transformer explode in my childhood neighbourhood and saw adults shrug, as if the darkness were weather. No one called the electricity company. Everyone lit candles and continued. It began the first time I heard a teacher say, “We will manage,” after the chalk ran out. Three words that hold an entire philosophy of survival – whispered in hospitals when drugs run out, in offices when the computers crash, in markets when the generator stops.
It began the first time I sat in a Lagos taxi, freshly returned from Russia in 1999, and listened to the driver explain inflation using the price of diesel and a bag of rice. He had no economics degree, but he understood what many economists miss: the lived experience of ordinary people is the data that matters. It began when I realised that Nigerians have become experts in survival – in improvisation, in endurance, in finding a way when there is no way. The third thing I want to say is this: we have learned to live with scarcity, and scarcity has taught us what abundance never could.
Over the years, I have filled notebooks. Some entries are a single sentence – a fragment overheard on a bus, a line capturing a feeling I had no words for. Others stretch across pages. A few are written in anger – after a child died because the hospital had no oxygen, after a community went six months without electricity, after police beat a journalist for doing her job. Many are written in confusion – about why things are the way they are, about how a country so rich can be so poor, about how a people so resilient can be so exhausted.
Some are written in awe – at the market woman who rises at 4 a.m., the unpaid teacher who still shows up, the young man who learned to code on a borrowed laptop. Slowly, a pattern emerged. Not a conclusion – Nigeria does not allow conclusions – but a direction. Nigeria is not simply going through a difficult patch. It is undergoing a deeper transformation. A shift in daily life, in how people relate to the state, in how they imagine the future. The fourth thing I want to say is this: the transformation is not on the surface. It is in the bones.
This becoming is not linear, and it is not uniform. It does not move at the same pace in Lagos as in Lafia, or in Abuja’s mansion districts as in rural Zamfara. In some places it is fast and visible – the cranes of Eko Atlantic, the fibre cables in Lagos, the solar panels on Ibadan rooftops. In others, it is almost invisible – a road slowly eroding, a hospital quietly declining, young people quietly leaving.
But it is everywhere. It shapes how young people talk about leaving the country – not with excitement but with resignation. It shapes how parents discuss school fees, carefully, like a peace treaty. It shapes how traders in Aba calculate prices with one eye on the exchange rate and the other on diesel. It shapes how communities in Plateau rebuild after violence, again and again. The fifth thing I want to say is this: the becoming is uneven, but it is universal. No one escapes it.
I have read widely about Nigeria – histories, memoirs, policy papers, novels, academic studies. I have listened to call-in shows where Nigerians from Katsina to Calabar speak with frustration and humour. I have followed researchers who study governance, inequality, and climate. I have spoken to friends in government whose idealism has eroded year by year.
I have spoken to activists who have fought the same battles for decades and kept going. I have spoken to entrepreneurs who built businesses despite the odds. I have spoken to teachers in classrooms with no roofs, nurses in clinics with no drugs, farmers in fields with no rain. Through all of it, one question keeps returning: What kind of country are we becoming? The sixth thing I want to say is this: the question is not rhetorical. It demands a real answer, even if the answer is not yet clear.
The question has followed me for years. Through airports and motor parks. Through weddings and funerals. Through election seasons, when posters cover every wall and politicians promise the earth, and through quiet months when the posters come down and the politicians disappear. It followed me into a conversation with a man in a Lokoja bus park who had lived through three political eras and felt the country was stuck in the same place – the names had changed, the problems had not.
It followed me to a nurse in Uyo who said she no longer watches the news because it makes her heart race, because knowing too much can break you. It followed me to a final-year engineering student in Ilorin who studies by candlelight, whose textbooks are ten years old, whose professors are overworked, and who dreams of becoming an engineer anyway. The seventh thing I want to say is this: the question follows us everywhere, and the answers come in fragments – in the stories of strangers, in the faces of people we pass on the street.
These are not data points. They are not entries in a spreadsheet. They are human experiences, raw and contradictory. But they reveal something data cannot capture: the emotional temperature of a nation. A researcher at the Nigerian Economic Summit Group once told me that the most important thing they measure is not GDP or inflation but how people feel, because how people feel shapes how they act, and how they act shapes the future. If people feel hopeful, they invest, they start businesses, they plan. If they feel hopeless, they leave, they withdraw, they stop caring. In Nigeria today, the temperature is fractured. Some people are hopeful – the tech entrepreneur in Yaba, the farmer in Kebbi, the trader in Aba.
Many others are exhausted – the teacher in Benue, the mother in Zamfara, the graduate in Kano. Some have stopped feeling anything. One young man told me he feels “tired before the day starts.” A retired civil servant said, “I have seen too much to be surprised anymore.” The eighth thing I want to say is this: the emotional temperature is the most important statistic, and it is rarely measured.
Part of what pushed me to write was the realisation that Nigeria is full of conversations that never reach the surface. Conversations about fear – of speaking out, of travelling at night, of being in the wrong place. Conversations about fatigue – of hustling, of struggling when the ends keep moving further apart. Conversations about hope – the stubborn, irrational kind that keeps people going. Conversations about disappointment – in leaders who promised, in policies that were abandoned, in systems that failed. They happen in kitchens between women who have known each other since childhood.
They happen in taxis between strangers who will never meet again. They happen in WhatsApp groups in the small hours, where people type and then delete, afraid of screenshots. They happen in the back rows of church halls and the quiet corners of offices, in lowered voices, with one eye on the door. They rarely make it into official reports, because reports speak the language of administration, not of experience. The ninth thing I want to say is this: the real conversation is happening beneath the surface, and it is time to bring it into the light.
I have also been shaped by what I have read about other societies – how they rose, faltered, adapted, collapsed. Luke Kemp’s *Goliath’s Curse*, which examines hundreds of societies across millennia, struck me not because it predicted Nigeria’s fate – Kemp is careful to say history does not predict – but because it gave me a vocabulary for patterns I had observed but could not name. Kemp writes about how societies become fragile when power becomes too concentrated. About how institutions stop working when feedback loops break – when citizens speak and no one hears.
About how inequality deepens when the rules are written by those who benefit from them. About how civic space shrinks when dissent becomes dangerous. About how collapse is often invisible until it has happened. Reading him, I thought about Nigeria – not as a doomed country, but as a country at a crossroads, with the resources and people to change course, but only if it first admits that a change is necessary. The tenth thing I want to say is this: we are not doomed, but we are fragile, and fragility demands attention.
This sketch is not a prophecy. I am not a prophet. I cannot tell you whether Nigeria will rise or fall, whether the cracks will be repaired or widen into chasms. It is not a warning, though there is much to warn about. It is not a manifesto, though there is much to fight for. It is an attempt to pay attention – to look closely, to listen carefully, to ask questions that have lingered for years, to resist easy answers. Some of these questions have answers. Many do not. But they all matter. The eleventh thing I want to say is this: paying attention is not passive. It is a form of engagement, a way of saying that what happens here matters.
I think of the young man I met in Minna, sitting behind a folding table covered in chargers, earphones, and power banks. A graduate of business administration, he had applied for dozens of jobs without a single callback. So he saved money from odd jobs, bought stock, and set up his table at the edge of the market. He now makes enough to eat, pay rent, and send a little home to his mother.
He said he no longer dreams big – not of a house, not of travel, not of starting a company. He dreams small: a generator that does not break down, a proper stall, an assistant so he can take a day off. “Big dreams are dangerous,” he said. “They make you forget what you have.”
I think of the teacher in Osogbo, a woman in her forties with a master’s in English literature, who has not been paid in months. The state cites cash flow. She still teaches. She wakes before dawn, rides a motorcycle to school, and writes on a cracked chalkboard. She marks assignments by candlelight because the school has no electricity. She buys chalk with her own money. She does it because the children deserve more than the country is giving them.
I think of the fisherman in Ondo, in his sixties, who told me the river he grew up on no longer yields fish because of pollution upstream. He described it as it used to be – clear, full of tilapia and catfish, where children swam and women washed clothes. Now it is brown and lifeless. He catches maybe ten percent of what he used to. He has taken work as a security guard. “The river has died,” he said. “And with it, my life.”
I think of the market woman in Makurdi who now buys food in smaller quantities because prices change faster than she can adjust. She used to buy a bag of rice once a month. Now she buys a cup at a time. She watches the exchange rate on her phone like a trader. “I used to plan for next week,” she said. “Now I plan for tomorrow. Tomorrow is all I can see.”
These are not isolated stories. They are part of the country we are becoming – a country where dreams shrink, where patience wears thin, where the horizon draws closer. The twelfth thing I want to say is this: these stories are not exceptions. They are the rule, and the rule is that life has become harder, more uncertain, more exhausting.
And yet there is another side. A side easy to overlook if you focus only on the hardship. It shows in the young Nigerians building tech startups in Yaba, where laptops glow late into the night and engineers build logistics platforms, payment systems, and health apps the government has failed to deliver. They do it without state support, without reliable electricity, without predictable internet. They do it because waiting has never worked. It shows in the farmers in Kebbi adopting new irrigation, digging wells by hand, experimenting with drought-resistant crops, sharing knowledge with their neighbours.
It shows in the nurses in Bauchi who work double shifts, walk miles to clinics, deliver babies by torchlight, and stay because leaving would feel like betrayal. It shows in the artisans of Aba – shoemakers, leather workers, tailors, mechanics – whose products travel across West Africa and compete with imports from China and Europe. The thirteenth thing I want to say is this: the hardship is real, but it is not the whole story. The resilience is also real, and it is hard-won.
This sketch tries to hold both sides together – to acknowledge the pain without ignoring the possibility, to recognise the fragility without denying the resilience, to name the cracks without concluding that collapse is inevitable. It tries to see the country not as a single story but as a collection of overlapping ones. Some are difficult to tell. Others are full of light, full of laughter, full of the kind of joy that comes not from abundance but from connection. Both kinds are true. The fourteenth thing I want to say is this: we are not one thing. We are many things, and they coexist – sometimes peacefully, sometimes in tension.
I do not know where this project will end. Nigeria is a country in motion, and motion does not lend itself to neat conclusions. People are always leaving and arriving. The economy shifts. Politics shifts. The climate shifts. What I know is that these notes have been with me for years, and it is time to give them shape.
Not to solve anything – I have no five-point plans. Not to predict anything – anyone who claims to know the future is lying. But simply to bear witness. To say: I was here. I saw this. I heard this. It mattered. The fifteenth thing I want to say is this: bearing witness is enough. Not because it fixes anything immediately, but because forgetting is a form of death, and remembering is a form of life.
Sometimes paying attention is itself a small rebellion against the forces that want you to look away. Sometimes asking the right questions is the beginning of understanding – not the end, but the start of a journey worth taking. A journalist once told me, “I don’t write because I have answers. I write because I have questions, and the questions deserve to be heard.” That is what I am trying to do here. The sixteenth thing I want to say is this: the questions are as important as the answers, and sometimes more so.
This is the opening of a long conversation. A conversation about the country we were promised by the independence leaders, the country of our national anthem, where “though tribe and tongue may differ, in brotherhood we stand.” A conversation about the country we live in – of broken transformers and thriving markets, of empty hospitals and crowded churches, of potholed roads and vibrant street art.
And a conversation about the country we are becoming – the one emerging from the choices we make and the choices we avoid. It is drawn from memory, from observation, from reading, from listening, and from the unglamorous work of being a citizen – waking each day to face the same problems, hoping tomorrow will be better, being disappointed, hoping again. The seventeenth thing I want to say is this: the conversation is not over. It has barely begun.
I hope this opening sketch helps us see ourselves more clearly – not as we were, not as we wish we were, but as we are. I hope it helps us ask better questions. I hope it helps us remember what we have survived, what we have built, what we have lost, what we still have. I hope it helps us see that the country we are becoming is not a destiny written in stone but a choice – a series of choices, made every day, by millions of people, in millions of small ways.
I hope, most of all, that it helps us choose differently – accountability over silence, solidarity over isolation, hope over resignation, the country we were promised over the country we have settled for. The country we are becoming is not yet fixed. It is still becoming. And we are the ones becoming it. The eighteenth and final thing I want to say is this: we are not passengers on this journey. We are the drivers. The road is rough, the destination unclear, but the steering wheel is in our hands. Let us hold it tightly.
