By Basil Odilim
I live in Nigeria—physically. But mentally, I no longer live here.
My body walks these roads. I breathe the air, endure the blackouts, hear the noise, and feel the tension in every overcrowded market and traffic jam. But my mind? It has relocated to a saner future. Not out of arrogance—but for survival. Because if I allowed my entire being to be absorbed into this present reality, I would either go mad or conform to the madness.
Nigeria is not a country that rewards deep thinking. It is a place built for hustling. For scrambling. For grabbing. And in a culture where urgency is king, depth dies a quiet death.
Let’s be clear: the problem is not just the economy. It is the culture that the economy has birthed and sustained. A culture where the goal is not to build a better world but to collect whatever crumbs one can before the next person does. We don’t work to change systems—we work to extract from them. That’s why real vision is rare. That’s why long-term thinking is almost extinct. Because you can’t go deep when you’re barely staying afloat.
Who, in this daily chaos, has time to think about a 10-year investment? A generation-long project? A purpose bigger than personal escape? It’s almost unthinkable. Not because we’re lazy or dull—but because the human brain, when trapped in survival mode, simply cannot think long-term. It becomes wired for the next bill, the next job, the next fuel price. Vision collapses into urgency. Legacy gives way to luck.
And so, hustling becomes culture. Hustling, by design, is short-term. You don’t plant trees when you need firewood tonight. You don’t invest in education when you need lunch. The average Nigerian isn’t dreaming of changing the world—they’re dreaming of escaping it. Morality bends, patience snaps, and shortcuts become instinct. Because in this culture, survival is success—and strategy is often seen as a waste of time.
But culture did not fall from the sky. It was shaped over decades—by leaders who rewarded loyalty over merit by institutions that punished integrity and glorified fraud by a society that slowly came to believe that ends always justify means. And now, even the best minds are cornered. Forced to either flee, fake it, or fall in line.
Think of dogs. There are intelligent breeds, aggressive ones, loyal ones. But even the smartest dog, placed in the wrong environment—where discipline is punished and corruption is rewarded—will underperform or turn wild. So, too, with people. Our problem isn’t a lack of intelligence. It’s a cultural starvation of discipline. We have not been trained to delay gratification, to drill deep, or to endure the long drought before the harvest.
Even the talented suffocate. Imagine if our best footballers had been forced to stay in Nigeria. Would they have become stars? Or would they still be dribbling on dusty streets, hoping someone “connects” them? Without structure, even brilliance decays.
And in this decay, shortcuts take over. From padded contracts to fake certificates, from ritual brotherhoods to quiet bribery, the logic is the same: the system won’t reward honesty, so bend it before it breaks you. And when those who bend the system are the ones we celebrate, what reason does anyone have to build anything that lasts?
We often say Nigeria’s economy is broken. But a broken economy can be fixed with policy. A broken culture, however, takes generations to rebuild. Because culture is upstream of everything—upstream of laws, institutions, even leadership. And until our culture changes, no reform will last. Because policy without value is just paperwork.
We must be honest: this country is not designed for deep thinking. Not yet. And until we make it so—not just on paper, but in practice—we will keep raising brilliant minds trapped in shallow waters. We will keep producing hustlers who run fast but go nowhere.
If we want to break this cycle, we must stop romanticizing the hustle. We must start rewarding patience, honoring discipline, and building structures that outlive us. Because the future will not be built by those who merely grab—it will be built by those who dig. And right now, we’re not digging. We’re scrambling.
