By Charles Obiajulu Ugwu- PhD
There is a new prayer whispered across Nigeria, rarely spoken aloud but widely practiced: “let me survive, no matter who bleeds”. It is not written in churches or mosques, yet it governs daily conduct more faithfully than doctrine. It lives in traffic, in offices, in markets, in politics, and even in homes. It is the silent creed of a society where endurance has quietly replaced conscience, and where staying afloat by any means has become the highest moral achievement.
This essay is not a lament for poverty alone. Poverty has always lived here. What is emerging now is more dangerous: a normalization of harm as strategy, an unspoken consensus that life is a zero-sum contest and that empathy is a luxury for those who can afford to lose. Nigeria is slowly rehearsing a version of survival that consumes the very social fabric it depends on. And like all rehearsals for collapse, it feels ordinary while it is happening.
Bako’s story is not exceptional. That is precisely why it matters.
Bako grew up by water, in a riverine community where survival was collective by necessity. Fishing was never an individual sport; nets were shared, boats repaired together, risks distributed. Hunger was real, but loneliness was rare. Elders mediated disputes, not because they were saints, but because cohesion was survival. Bako learned early that life was fragile. What he failed to learn what many now fail to learn is that fragility demands care, not cunning.
When the cooperative collapsed under mismanagement and political neglect, Bako adapted faster than others. He sold shared fishing nets quietly, telling himself it was temporary. He signed land documents on behalf of half-blind elders, telling himself development would come. He hoarded fuel during scarcity, telling himself the system was broken anyway. Each act was small, rational, defensible in isolation. That is how moral erosion works: never loud, never sudden, always reasonable.
By the time Bako “made it,” his village had thinned out. Some left. Some gave up. Some stayed and endured quietly. He returned occasionally, distributing gifts like compensation for an unnamed crime. People praised his success because praise is cheaper than confrontation, and because Nigerians are trained to admire outcomes more than processes. We clap for arrival, not for how the journey was made.
This is the Nigeria we are becoming.
A country where the yahoo boy justifies fraud as “taking back” from a cruel world. Where the politician loots because “if I don’t, the next person will.” Where the civil servant delays files until bribes appear, not out of greed alone, but because his salary cannot survive the month. Where landlords raise rents without shame because “the market is tough.” Where employers exploit youth labour under the banner of “experience.” Where religious leaders sell miracles as subscriptions. Where everyone is tired, and tiredness becomes a moral excuse.
What unites these acts is not wickedness in the dramatic sense. It is something more banal and more frightening: a shared belief that survival absolves everything.
In traffic, this belief is visible. A driver forces his way into a narrow lane, nearly causing an accident. When challenged, he snaps, “Na who first die lose.” It is said jokingly, but jokes are often confessions. On the road, consideration is weakness. Courtesy is delay. Delay is death in economic, social, symbolic. Everyone must arrive first, even if no one arrives safely.
In workplaces, the same logic thrives. Colleagues sabotage one another quietly. Information is hoarded. Credit is stolen. Junior staff are sacrificed to protect senior reputations. Meetings are theatres of politeness masking private calculations. Nobody asks whether the system is humane; they only ask whether they are next in line to be crushed. When survival becomes competitive, solidarity becomes suspicious.
Markets tell similar stories. Traders inflate prices during scarcity without blinking. A mother with crying children is not a moral interruption; she is a bargaining weakness. “I also have children,” the trader says, as if suffering cancels suffering. This is the language of a society that no longer distinguishes between necessity and opportunism.
Even family is not spared. Inheritance disputes tear siblings apart. Care for elderly parents becomes transactional. Marriage becomes an exit strategy rather than a covenant. Friendships are measured by usefulness. Trust becomes expensive. Love becomes conditional.
Bako did not invent this Nigeria. He merely embodied it early.
When the flood came and erased his village, it exposed something deeper than environmental neglect. It revealed the cost of a life lived without social investment. Bako returned with money, but money is a poor substitute for presence. He had extracted value without replenishing trust. He had survived alone in a system that once survived together. When crisis arrived, there was no moral capital left to draw from.
This is the caution Nigeria must hear, though it will resist it.
Consequences are not always immediate. They are patient. They wait while we celebrate cleverness. They allow us to confuse luck with wisdom. They let systems rot slowly. Then they arrive, not as punishment, but as arithmetic.
A society that normalizes harm as survival eventually becomes unlivable for everyone, including the winners.
We see this already. Crime escalates not just because of poverty, but because trust has collapsed. Kidnapping thrives where life is cheap. Corruption metastasizes where accountability feels foolish. Violence spreads where empathy has been rationed. People retreat into gated communities, private schools, private generators, private security, imagining they have escaped. They have not. They have only delayed the reckoning.
Nigeria’s middle class lives in this illusion most comfortably. They curse politicians, yet replicate the same extractive logic in smaller spaces. They condemn corruption, yet justify sharp practices as “how things are done.” They pray for national change while practicing personal exemption. This schizophrenia is not hypocrisy; it is fatigue weaponized into philosophy.
Religion, which should restrain this impulse, often amplifies it. Prosperity is preached without moral weight. Testimonies celebrate outcomes without interrogating means. Success is spiritualized, while victims are invisible. God becomes a sponsor of arrival, not a judge of process. In such a climate, conscience becomes negotiable.
But history is unforgiving to societies that worship survival alone.
Every collapsed civilization carried people who thought they were merely being realistic. Rome had its pragmatists. Liberia had its survivors. Rwanda had its rationalizers. The language is always the same: this is how the world works. What changes is only the scale of the aftermath.
Nigeria is not doomed. But it is drifting.
The danger is not hunger; Nigerians have endured hunger before. The danger is moral numbness the quiet agreement that other people’s pain is acceptable collateral. Once that agreement settles in, cruelty no longer feels like cruelty. It feels like strategy.
And strategy, once normalized, trains the next generation.
Children watch adults cut corners and call it wisdom. They learn that kindness is optional and that success excuses everything. They grow up fluent in survival but illiterate in responsibility. By the time they inherit the country, they will not know what they lost—only that something feels permanently broken.
This is why Bako’s story must be told not as tragedy, but as mirror.
He survived. Yet his survival hollowed the ground beneath him. When crisis came, there was no community to absorb the shock. Only water, memory, and silence.
Nigeria is approaching a similar edge. Environmental disasters, economic shocks, demographic pressures—these are not abstract forecasts. They are gathering. When they arrive fully, money alone will not save anyone. What will matter then is trust, cooperation, restraint, and shared obligation. The very things we are currently trading away for speed.
There is an older wisdom we are forgetting. In many African cultures, life was never judged by longevity alone, but by footprint. You were remembered not for how far you climbed, but for how many people remained standing after you passed. Survival was communal, or it was meaningless.
This wisdom is not sentimental. It is practical. Societies that protect their weakest are more resilient, not less. Economies that temper competition with fairness last longer. Communities that punish predation early avoid collapse later. Moral restraint is not charity; it is insurance.
The question Nigeria must confront is uncomfortable: what kind of survivors are we producing?
If survival requires trampling others, it is not survival rather it is deferred collapse. If success demands moral blindness, it is not success it is borrowing against the future. If everyone must fend for themselves, then no one is truly safe.
Pay time always comes. Not mystically. Structurally. Systems collect what they tolerate.
Bako learned this too late. Nigeria still has time.
But time, like the river, does not announce when it is done waiting.
Author:
Dr. Charles Obiajulu Ugwu is a contrarian thinker, he writes at the intersection of conscience, systems, and human consequence, challenging societies to confront uncomfortable truths before they harden into destiny.
