The burden of our survival can no longer be deferred to the next election cycle, or packaged into desperate prayers. It falls squarely on us. We must shed our fear. We must organise horizontally, build parallel networks of community security, fiercely interrogate every public official, and ensure that every single act of governance failure carries a severe, unbearable social and political cost for the perpetrator.
For decades, Nigerians have worn resilience like a badge of honour. The world praises us for our unique capacity to absorb pain, to navigate systemic indignity, and to survive where others would break. But let us be honest with ourselves, our celebrated resilience is no longer a virtue. It has become a curse. It is the psychological cage we have built for ourselves: the very anaesthetic that allows a predatory ruling class to pillage our homeland while we quietly pray for miracles and run abroad in search of a better life.
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Section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) provides that, “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.” Thus, it can be said that Section 14 (2)(b) is the sacred bond that binds the Nigerian people and the government together, and any government formed in Nigeria which cannot keep children safe in schools, farmers safe on their farms, worshippers safe in their place of worship, and travellers safe on the road, has not merely underperformed but failed woefully.
If you want a classic depiction of how the sacred bond between a government and its people has been torn apart, look no further than a Nigerian classroom. Twelve years ago, the world watched in horror as the winter began with the abduction of 276 girls in Chibok. We treated it like an isolated tragedy. Instead, it was the opening chapter of a country-wide enterprise of terror. We have grown so desensitised that we scroll past headlines like: “Forty-five students (45) violently abducted in Ogbomoso”, “Gunmen kill seven in fresh attack on Plateau village”, “Classrooms raided in Nasarawa,” and feel no shiver of terror.
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Nigeria already carries the burden of over 20 million out-of-school children (the highest rates in the world). For context, that is more than the population of Lagos state. By turning our schools into hunting grounds, the state forces a devastating choice upon rural parents: keep your children at home in illiterate safety where you can at least put up a fight before they are snatched from you, or send them to school and risk losing them to the wilderness. When a child’s education is permanently halted by the trauma of a gun barrel, a thread of national development is cut forever.
The fatal mistake we make in Nigeria is assuming that national decline is linear, but in reality national decay compounds exponentially. Two sustained years of crisis can set a nation back by decades. We are systematically engineering an illiterate, traumatised generation, guaranteeing a future of unending unrest. See the sprawling Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps that have multiplied across Northern Nigeria over the last fifteen years.
The simple, terrifying truth not being said enough is that we are standing at the edge of total societal collapse, and this degradation is a betrayal of the very foundation of human civilisation, and the bedrock upon which the Nigerian government derives its powers. John Locke espoused this in his work, Second Treatise of Government (1689), arguing that the sole justification for the existence of any government is the preservation of the citizens’ fundamental rights: life, liberty, and estate. Locke made it clear that if a government fails to protect us, it defaults on the social contract, and we possess a moral right to lawful civic resistance and must replace the leadership.
The fatal mistake we make in Nigeria is assuming that national decline is linear, but in reality national decay compounds exponentially. Two sustained years of crisis can set a nation back by decades. We are systematically engineering an illiterate, traumatised generation, guaranteeing a future of unending unrest. See the sprawling Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps that have multiplied across Northern Nigeria over the last fifteen years. These camps are no longer temporary shelters; they are permanent monuments to a government that has surrendered its own territory. Millions of Nigerian children are being born and raised beneath plastic tarpaulins, stripped of identity, dignity, and hope. A nation that breeds its future inside refugee camps on its own soil is a nation suffering from a brain haemorrhage.
If we believe Nigeria cannot fail, we must look at the ghost of a nation with a very similar trajectory that ignored this exact compounding rot until they hit total liquidation. Venezuela, in the late 20th century, was the wealthiest, most stable democracy in South America, sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves. The country relied solely on oil for 80 per cent of its total export revenue, which funded two-third of its government budget and embarked on a subsidy regime that supported at least 13 South American countries at its peak. Between 1999 and 2014, the political class treated the national wealth as a private piggy bank, replacing technical competence with ideological loyalty and surrendering local policing to armed civilian gangs called Colectivos.
A 2016 publication by GSI described Venezuela’s capital city, Caracas, as the ‘kidnap capital of the world’. When the oil cycle turned, the freefall to complete destruction took less than 36 months. By 2017, the country was locked in hyperinflation, the healthcare system had vanished, the UNHCR reported that there are 7.9 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants globally. Today, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports show that the inflation rate in Venezuela stands at 387.4 per cent, and about 56 per cent of Venezuelans live in extreme poverty. If you do a quick search of what caused the collapse of the Venezuela economy, it matches the current reality of Nigeria: insecurity, poor governance and economic mismanagement, political corruption, hyperinflation, and over-reliance on one resource.
But history shows us that this cycle can be broken. Other nations have stood in this exact abyss, took back their countries, and completely turned their fortunes around. Consider South Korea. Following the devastation of the Korean War in the 1950s, it was an impoverished, corrupt state with low literacy and zero industrial future. Yet, through a massive public obsession with education, a ruthless, uncompromising crackdown on corruption, and overwhelming citizen protests such as the Gwangju and June democratic struggle…
Just like Venezuela, we have watched our commonwealth emptied through billions of the Abacha loot. We saw our sovereign rights bartered away in the dark corridors of the Malabu Oil scam, and our national dignity compromised in the predatory manoeuvres of the P&ID scandal and the Alison-Madueke case. Our leaders make these short-sighted, foolish decisions, and loot with such brazen impunity, because they have calculated the cost of our resistance and found it to be absolutely zero. They treat us like fools because, as citizens, we continue to prove them right through our silence, our gullibility, and our fear.
But history shows us that this cycle can be broken. Other nations have stood in this exact abyss, took back their countries, and completely turned their fortunes around. Consider South Korea. Following the devastation of the Korean War in the 1950s, it was an impoverished, corrupt state with low literacy and zero industrial future. Yet, through a massive public obsession with education, a ruthless, uncompromising crackdown on corruption, and overwhelming citizen protests such as the Gwangju and June democratic struggle, the people forced the state to align with the public good. South Korea’s democracy was not secured in a year; it was built upon the protest and sacrifice of many.
The burden of our survival can no longer be deferred to the next election cycle, or packaged into desperate prayers. It falls squarely on us. We must shed our fear. We must organise horizontally, build parallel networks of community security, fiercely interrogate every public official, and ensure that every single act of governance failure carries a severe, unbearable social and political cost for the perpetrator. We must rise to the occasion, reclaim our country, and force Nigeria onto the path of greatness, or accept that our silence makes us accomplices to our own destruction.
Testimony Jesutoye is a Nigerian lawyer and can be contacted through [email protected]. His opinions do not reflect that of any organisation or body he is associated with.
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