How Nigerians Outsourced Their Conscience and Blame the Harvest*
By Charles Obiajulu Ugwu – PhD
I never intended to remember that evening on the Onitsha–Owerri Road, but memory has a way of insisting on its relevance. My car had sputtered to a halt beneath a streetlight that flickered like a dying conscience. A man appeared from the shadows lean, restless, carrying the posture of someone who had negotiated too often with disappointment.
He offered help, the way Nigerians do: generously at first, then with terms that reveal the country’s unwritten constitution. He tapped the bonnet with ritual seriousness, made a show of diagnosing the problem, and after a few minutes of choreographed effort announced a price that could pay for a decent family’s groceries for a month.
When I questioned him, he didn’t quarrel. He simply gave that shrug that lives somewhere between fatalism and quiet defiance.
“Oga, everybody dey survive.”
That phrase excuse, anthem, surrender followed me long after the car coughed back to life. It struck me with an uncomfortable clarity: the man’s ethics, his worldview, his relationship with desperation and advantage these were not outliers. They were the soil. And in that soil, leaders grow.
What chilled me was the realization that nothing in his behavior barred him from becoming a local government chairman, a commissioner, a federal legislator, or even a governor. The ethic was the same; only scale separates the roadside hustler from the national looter.
And that is where Nigeria must begin its reckoning:
“we condemn leaders who are merely enlarged versions of ourselves.”
The comfortable fiction of a distant leadership class
Nigeria loves the delusion that leaders come from somewhere else a darker continent within this continent. We imagine they descend from strange clouds, already corrupt, already unprincipled, already other. This lie protects us from the anxiety of introspection.
But the truth is brutally plain:
leadership is not imported; it is harvested.
And societies harvest what they plant.
The trader who hides rotten tomatoes at the bottom of the basin raises a senator who hides stolen billions behind budget lines.
The parent who bribes a teacher for a child’s grades raises a minister who manipulates national statistics.
The citizen who sees public property as “government tin” raises governors who treat the national treasury as family inheritance.
We are the chrysalis from which our butterflies and beasts emerge.
The caterpillar that becomes the leaf
Every society has its metaphors, but ours is painfully accurate:
the caterpillar becomes the color of the leaf it feeds on.
Leadership in Nigeria does not corrupt itself; it inherits the corruption of the crowd. It absorbs the opportunism, the shortcuts, the fatalism, the worship of power, the envy dressed as morality. Leaders behave like the culture that raised them.
Walk through any Nigerian street and you’ll hear the same refrain whispered or shouted:
“Na who chop, wey dem catch.”
“Use your head.”
“No dull yourself.”
“Man must survive.”
This survivalist gospel produces leadership that does not govern it extracts. It pillages with the confidence that the ruled understand the game and are simply annoyed at being spectators.
Election seasons expose the truth with embarrassing clarity. Vote-selling is not an accident; it is a negotiation. Voters understand the mathematics: sell now, suffer later. They simply prefer the immediacy of cash to the abstraction of civic duty. And afterward, they lament with theatrical innocence: “These leaders have no shame.”
But shame cannot flourish in a society that monetizes its own dignity.
Nigerians have been trained to expect nothing
The greatest national tragedy is not corruption; it is the quiet decision millions have made to surrender their civic worth. You see it in the slouched shoulders at government offices, in the timid questions citizens ask those who are meant to serve them. You see it in the fearful politeness directed at those who weaponize public roles for private intimidation.
In a federal ministry once, an elderly woman bones tired, voice frayed approached a desk officer with the humility of someone approaching a deity. He barked at her for daring to inquire about her own file. She apologized.
She apologized.
How can accountability survive in a nation where the oppressed apologize to the indifferent?
A people who no longer believe the state owes them service create leaders who no longer feel obliged to give any. When dignity becomes negotiable, so does governance.
The small corruptions we have sanctified
Remove every politician from office today and Nigeria will still malfunction tomorrow. Because the real rot lives in ordinary homes, in everyday transactions.
Consider the mechanic who tightens one part and loosens another for return business.
The customs officer whose smile appears only when “cooperation” is mentioned.
The pastor who boasts of “divine connections” while burying civic truth.
The uncle who secures jobs with forged references.
The neighbor who dumps refuse in the drainage because “everybody does it.”
The police officer who speaks the language of extortion with fluency.
The youth who fabricates credentials to escape unemployment.
These are not fringe behaviors they are cultural norms that prepare the pathway for political robbery. Our politicians are not deviations; they are graduates of these micro-improprieties.
When small wrongs become acceptable, large wrongs become inevitable.
The secret admiration for abuse
Too many Nigerians do not despise corruption they despise being excluded from it. That is our moral fracture.
I once drove with a friend when a politician’s convoy tore through traffic, scattering order like chaff. After the sirens faded, he exhaled with admiration disguised as anger.
“If na me get this kind power, I go do pass them.”
He wasn’t joking.
This is our collective confession: we hate the abuse of power only when we are not the abusers.
Every election cycle, we pretend to seek integrity but vote for “capacity” a euphemism for the ability to deliver benefits, legal or otherwise, to our tribe, our village, our pockets. We criticize corruption but pray for shortcuts. We condemn impunity but bow to it when it favors us.
A nation cannot rise above the behaviors it secretly admires.
A country that forgets to remember
No democracy survives when the people’s memory has the attention span of a spark. Nigerians forget infractions like breath. A politician can preside over ruin, disappear for a season, and return with a new party logo and suddenly he is a “fresh option.”
The amnesia is astonishing:
Politicians who weaponized ethnic tension return as “unifiers.”
Those who drained state coffers return as “experienced leaders.”
Those who mocked justice return as “elder statesmen.”
Those who endangered citizens return as “men of capacity.”
This is why the cycle repeats. The people forget too fast and forgive too fully. A society that cannot remember cannot punish; a society that cannot punish cannot deter; a society that cannot deter cannot progress.
The mirror we fear more than poverty
Let us speak without anesthesia:
Nigeria’s failure is not an accident. It is not an external imposition. It is a reflection.
We produce the leaders we deserve because we have normalized the behaviors that make their rise possible. We are not victims of an alien elite rather we are the architects of the very system we curse.
The rot is not up there. It is everywhere.
In us. Around us. Through us.
Many Nigerians want good governance, but few want good citizenship.
Many want justice, but few want the responsibility of being just.
Many want accountability, but few want to confront their own complicity.
The mirror has always been the most honest prophet. And we have refused to look.
What must change and where change must begin
Nations are not transformed by charismatic presidents. They are transformed by citizens who rediscover their civic value and defend it as if it were oxygen.
Change begins when:
- Citizens stop selling their futures one election at a time.
- Communities act as custodians of public projects.
- Parents teach truth as inheritance.
- Wealth is admired only when its source is clean.
- Civil servants remember that service is not a tax on the public.
- Religious leaders abandon prosperity theatre for civic morality.
- Society raises the cost of wrongdoing until corruption becomes an unprofitable venture.
- Nigeria will not change because of leadership reform alone.
- It will change because the people reform themselves. Leaders are symptoms; citizens are the diagnosis.
The final warning:
*No nation outruns the character of its people*
Nigeria is not melting because of bad leaders alone. It is melting because the people: vibrant, brilliant, wounded, improvisational have normalized a thousand small betrayals.
And when small betrayals accumulate, they become a national identity.
A country cannot demand from its leaders what it refuses to demand from itself.
A society cannot sow dishonesty and expect justice to bloom.
A people cannot practice tiny impunities and hope for grand integrity.
Nigeria will rise on the day Nigerians finally refuse to be morally small.
When we stop surviving and start insisting.
When dignity becomes non-negotiable.
When the mirror becomes an ally, not an adversary.
Until then, we will keep running from our reflection.
And the reflection will keep winning.
About the Author
Dr. Charles Obiajulu Ugwu is a contrarian thinker, creative philosopher, and systems analyst whose work focuses on dissecting the unnoticed delusions that underpin modern human institutions
