Cosmetics On Weak Foundations: Why Nigeria Shines From Afar And Cracks Up Close

From a distance, Nigeria shines.

Flyovers cut through Lagos traffic. Glass towers rise in Abuja. Governors unveil new secretariats with fresh paint, new logos, and master plans rendered in glossy 3D. Online, we are Africa’s largest economy, its biggest entertainment exporter, its loudest democracy.

Come closer. The shine thins.

We have mastered the art of applying cosmetics where we need concrete. We paint the wall while the foundation underneath quietly gives way. That has been our habit since Independence.

It began with how the house itself was joined. In 1914, Lord Lugard stitched North and South together not because the peoples wanted to live together, but because one side was in deficit and the other in surplus. No Emir was asked. No Oba. No Obi. More than 250 nationalities were bundled into one space, the centralized emirate of Sokoto alongside the constitutional monarchy of Oyo where the Oyomesi could restrain the Alaafin, alongside the republican village assembly of Igboland. Then in 1946, the Richards Constitution locked that mistake into three regions drawn around three majority tribes, and turned cultural difference into political rivalry.

We have lived in a house we never agreed to live in.

Because the house was never settled, we never built an economy to carry it. We found oil and stopped trying. We sell crude and buy petrol. We sell raw cocoa and buy chocolate. When oil prices rise, Abuja shares more money and we call it growth. When they fall, everything shakes. There is no steady power behind it, no rail that lets a trader move goods from Owerri to Kano at a price that still leaves profit. We chose rent over work.

And we fell in love with the commissioning ceremony. We love to build, we hate to maintain. A road is tarred today with drums and speeches, and after one rainy season it is a trench because drainage was an afterthought. A school block is opened, but there is no vote to keep its roof. We spent billions on the grid and still generate less than a small European city, so we privatized darkness and called it light. Every home, every shop, now owns its own small power station. You cannot industrialize a country on generators.

We did the same with our map. Except for the Mid-West in 1963, no state in Nigeria was born by referendum. Twelve states in 1967 as a war strategy. Nineteen in 1976. Twenty-one in 1987, thirty in 1991. Thirty-six in 1996. All by military decree. Imo was carved from East Central in 1976. Abia was carved from Imo in 1991. The people of Orlu, of Ngwa, of Anioma were never asked what they wanted. So we grew up seeing a state as a gift from a soldier, not a contract among neighbours.

When the map is drawn that way, institutions learn to bow. Our laws are elegant on paper, perhaps among the finest constitutions in the world, but enforcement bends for the strong. Agencies roar when the target is weak and whisper when the target is connected. Files do not move without an envelope. Admission needs a godfather. Once people stop believing that rules are real, everything becomes more expensive.

Nothing shows this more than what we did to our people. We took our children to educate them, and began by shaming them out of themselves. A child who spoke Igbo or Yoruba in class was made to wear a board: I AM A VERNACULAR SPEAKER. We pushed aside the systems that actually built us, the Igba-boi apprenticeship that built Aba and Nnewi, the Omoluabi code that said character outranks wealth, the age-grade that taught communal work and accountability. We replaced them with a chase for certificates for jobs that do not exist, while jobs that do exist, welders, technicians, agro-processors, cannot find skilled hands. We celebrate literacy while public primary schools have no roofs. We decorate the top floor while the ground floor is flooded.

We keep choosing paint because paint is politically profitable. Paint can be commissioned in six months, in time for the next election. A foundation takes twenty years. You cannot cut a ribbon on a culture of maintenance, on an independent judiciary, on an education that restores dignity. So we choose the visible over the vital.

And Nigerians adjust. We live double lives because the state lives half a life. We budget for NEPA and for diesel. For tax and for private security. For school fees and for lesson teachers to teach what school failed to teach.

We do not lack talent, or money, or ideas. We lack the patience to lay blocks properly and let them set.

What would it mean to finally lay them?

It would mean sitting down, at last, to agree on how we want to live together, because a house joined without consultation must one day have that conversation. It would mean fixing power as if our lives depend on it, because they do, and no real economy can grow in the dark. It would mean fixing education so it remembers who we are, teaching our languages as assets and formalizing what we already know about apprenticeship and community into real technical learning. It would mean fixing governance from the bottom, so that a local chairman in Imo is judged not by billboards that welcome him, but by refuse collected, health centres stocked, water running. And it would mean consequences, plain and even, until the law stops checking names before it acts.

A house built on cosmetics will always need more cosmetics. A house built on a foundation will stand long after the paint fades.

It is time to put down the makeup brush, and pick up the trowel.