Culture Is the Operating System: The Real Reason Nigeria’s Systems Fail

#BigAgendaAfrica: Culture, Not Structure

The Cost of Movement

Nigeria moves. Every day, every hour, every minute. We move so much that we hardly stop to notice what movement costs us.

Conservatively, Nigerians spend hundreds of billions of naira daily simply moving from Point A to Point B. Adjust the figures for reality, and it approaches one billion dollars a day flowing through our transportation sector. Apple does not earn that. Tesla does not earn that. Google does not earn that. But Nigeria’s chaos does.

And yet, nothing improves.

The money does not flow into systems. It does not build mass transit. It does not widen roads or enforce rules. It flows instead into something amorphous, unnamed, but universally understood. Miscellaneous. Not a category. A principality.

One that funds cultism and political violence, rigs elections, weakens law enforcement, and ensures that anything which threatens informal profit dies quietly.

Why Disorder Persists

That is why mass transit never takes root.
That is why roads decay faster than they are built.
That is why enforcement agencies harass private citizens but tiptoe around commercial chaos.

A bus can invade oncoming traffic on a five-lane highway, cut back when it pleases, and face no consequences. Everyone knows why.

We spend millions funding regulators that regulate nothing. Money wasted. Money that could lift millions out of poverty. And this is just one example. There are dozens.

The Seduction of Restructuring

When confronted with this, we reach instinctively for a familiar word: restructuring.

We widen the goalposts when we cannot score. Ministries fail, so we create commissions. Commissions fail, so we create agencies. Agencies fail, so we restructure.

Not because it works, but because doing something feels better than doing the hard thing.

The hard thing is looking in the mirror.

Why Fear Fails

I once told a Chinese partner how much I admired China for executing corrupt officials. He laughed. For a full minute. Then he said, “It makes no difference.”

Corruption persists because fear does not cure culture.

The oil industry learned this the hard way. Workers were fired for missing seat belts, for minor safety infractions. Statistics did not improve. Then an oil company brought in behavioural scientists from the University of Manchester.

They studied attitudes, not punishments. The result was the “Hearts and Minds” programme.

And suddenly, safety improved dramatically.

This is not ideology.
It is settled science.

Culture beats punishment.
Culture beats structure.
Culture beats fear.

Institutions That Multiply Failure

The same truth explains why institutions like the NDDC, OMPADEC, and similar bodies exist at all. They were created because existing structures failed.

But instead of asking why they failed, we simply added more layers.

Find out why ministries, derivation funds, and community programmes produced no impact, or create new structures and move on. That is our pattern.

The Theatre of Reform

Some argue we should design fool-proof systems that minimise the damage foolish leaders can do. But folly does not reside in systems alone.

It lives in people.

Cut one hydra head, two grow back. Until hearts and minds change, reform remains theatre.

Restructuring without reculturing is like bathing a homeless man, giving him a haircut, dressing him in a Gucci suit, and spraying cologne.

He will look and smell good for a while. Then slowly, inevitably, he will revert.

The question is not cosmetic.

Is he homeless because he stinks, or does he stink because he is homeless?

Character Is the Bottleneck

The same applies to systems. Abroad, an ATM running out of cash is a once-in-a-decade event. Here, it is normal.

Not because machines are different, but because somewhere in the chain a Nigerian human being intervenes.

You can automate processes.
You cannot automate character.

Engineers wait for restructuring. Judges wait. Policemen wait. Civil servants wait. Politicians wait. Everyone points at structure, insisting they would perform perfectly if only the system were better.

No.

The problem is not the system alone. It is the people inside it.

A former president captured it succinctly: even if you bring technology, without the human mind willing to do what is right, it will be manipulated.

That sentence demolishes entire libraries of restructuring arguments.

Neglect as a Message

Neglect speaks. It whispers that no one cares and that there are no consequences. Law-abiding people hear it and begin to vandalise.

This is the logic behind the broken window theory. Ignore small failures and you invite larger ones. Fix them early and culture improves.

This is not philosophy.
It is sociology.

Power Without Care

Leadership by intrigue thrives in such environments. Kings and queens play chess while citizens become pawns. Billionaires are humiliated one day and indulged the next.

Foreign investors are courted rhetorically while local capital is treated with contempt.

Then we wonder why investment flees.

Structure cannot compensate for cultural deficiency. Garbage in, garbage out. You can redesign the terminal endlessly, but if the same garbage is fed into it, the output remains dysfunction.

Culture, not structure, is the operating system.

The Death of Specialisation

Civilisations rise on specialisation. We abandoned it. Everyone chases money without accountability.

Fishermen become contractors.
Drivers manage refineries.
Middlemen flourish while makers disappear.

Power without control.
Politics without economics.
Noise without output.

Nothing grows.

Small Choices, National Consequences

Sometimes culture reveals itself in a single moment. A young man once took a light bulb from a store under his supervision, then stopped and returned it, asking himself when he had become a thief.

That choice, multiplied millions of times, determines the fate of nations.

Cameras do not create integrity.
Self-respect does.

Designing for Theft

Devious minds cannot restructure anything honestly. They redesign systems with future crimes in mind.

Pipelines are built to be tapped.
Laws are written with loopholes pre-installed.
Reforms are planned around anticipated theft.

Until we accept this, restructuring remains self-deception.

Water, the Simplest Test

And then there is water.

There is a body of water barely fifty metres behind a man’s house, yet every morning he walks miles with jerrycans in search of potable water.

Not because the technology is absent, but because nobody cares.

Not in the way that turns budgets into boreholes or policy into pipes.

In other parts of the world, citizens drink without thinking. In Nigeria, you think first. Then you walk. Then you carry.

When floods come, no one asks why drains were never built. Cameras arrive. Canals are theatrically cleared. Citizens are blamed. Taxes are still due.

This is not a failure of structure.
It is a failure of care.

The Indictment

On a road between two of Lagos’s finest hotels, boulders have sat for over a year. They damaged my car. They remain.

Nobody cares.

English prisons care more about inmates than Nigeria cares about citizens.

That is the indictment.

Restructuring as Pacifier

Every few years, we shout “Restructuring!” Then elections come and the shouting stops. The pacifier is returned to the child.

Restructuring soothes.
It does not feed.

Fifty years ago, a governor promised running water in Benin City. It never came. Today, everyone digs their own well.

We call this resilience.

It is abandonment dressed as strength.

Where Values Truly Live

Culture is not what we proclaim on Independence Day. It is what happens when power is unsupervised and rules are inconvenient.

A society’s true values are found not in its laws but in its loopholes.

Where corruption is punished, integrity becomes normal.
Where corruption is excused, competence becomes dangerous.

Over time, people stop asking what is right and ask only what works.

And what works becomes tradition.

The Slow Rot

Institutions do not collapse from the outside. They rot from within, politely, with paperwork.

You cannot legislate virtue into a society that punishes honesty.
You cannot innovate where truth is treated as betrayal.

Culture is destiny not because it is immutable, but because it is cumulative.

Every exception becomes precedent.
Every lie becomes a lesson.
Every punished truth becomes a warning.

The Forgotten Truth

Africa’s greatest achievements lie behind us not because Africans were better then, but because we lived by a truth we have since abandoned:

Ubuntu.

I am because we are.

The Only Way Forward

Structures will not make us better humans. Only better humans can build better societies.

Culture is the hand on the wheel.

Until it is straightened, the destination will not change.

I rest my case.

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