By TOCHUKWU NKWOCHA
We complain every single day about bad governance, broken roads, failing hospitals, and collapsing public institutions. We scream on X, preach from pulpits, and pray for “a Nigeria that works.”
Let us tell ourselves the bitter truth that nobody wants to admit:
Deep down, a vast number of Nigerians do not actually want a Nigeria that works for everybody.
What many truly want is an exclusive pass to bypass the dysfunction, while watching everyone else suffer through it.
Our society runs on an unspoken, toxic addiction to the “I pass my neighbor” hierarchy.
Your success in Nigeria is rarely measured by your intrinsic quality of life, your peace of mind, or the systems you build. It is measured almost entirely by relative elevation over the people around you.
For a typical Nigerian’s ego to feel satisfied, someone else must be visibly stranded.
Watch how this plays out in daily life:
When the national grid collapses and the entire neighborhood plunges into total darkness, the man with a diesel generator or a massive solar inverter doesn’t just enjoy electricity.
He feels a quiet, smug sense of supremacy.
The loud roar of his generator roaring over the silence of his neighbors’ pitch-black compounds isn’t just backup power—it is an audible announcement that he is distinct, anointed, and “doing better.”
If 24/7 public electricity suddenly became available to every street, corner, and slum tomorrow at an affordable flat rate, watch how quickly his psychological high evaporates. Because when everyone has constant light, power ceases to be a luxury flex. It just becomes a utility. And a utility does not feed an insecure ego.
Look at how we navigate the chaos:
*We don’t want clean, functional public hospitals where every citizen gets dignity and timely surgery; we want enough cash to fly to London, India, or Dubai for a routine checkup while taking selfies at the terminal.
*We don’t want high-quality public primary and secondary schools; we want to pay four million naira per term in private schools so we can drop the school name casually during society meetings.
*We don’t want smooth, paved public highways; we want to buy massive Japanese and German SUVs that can bounce over crater-sized potholes, looking down through tinted glass at the pedestrians breathing in red dust.
*We don’t even want orderly traffic; we pay for police escorts with blaring sirens to whip ordinary citizens out of the road so our convoy can clear a path.
Notice the sickness: The dysfunction is the very backdrop against which your status shines.
If the public system actually functioned, you couldn’t hire a fellow human being to wash your car and wash your clothes for starvation wages.
If the courts worked and public infrastructure was modern, you couldn’t use your “connections” to oppress a tenant, jump a queue at an agency, or threaten an ordinary citizen with a uniform.
Our definition of “blessing” has been completely corrupted by this elitist rot.
We go to church or mosque on Sunday and Friday and give testimonies: “God made a way for me where there was no way! Out of two hundred people, they picked only me!”
We celebrate exception as proof of divine favor, rather than recognizing that a society where basic human dignity is an exception is fundamentally broken.
And look at the tragedy when our people relocate abroad: They land in the UK, Canada, or the US, where the road is paved for everybody. Where the billionaire’s children and the immigrant cleaner’s children attend the exact same council school. Where everyone gets clean tap water, functional trains, and uninterrupted power.
And do you know what secretly disturbs many middle-class Africans when they first arrive? The loss of artificial superiority. Suddenly, having uninterrupted electricity isn’t a flex. Having a car isn’t a social weapon. You cannot casually order domestic staff around or bribe an official to skip the line.
You have to stand in the same queue with everyone else. And for an ego forged in the fires of Nigerian elitism, true equality feels like an insult.
We cannot build a serious nation with a population that secretly feasts on the helplessness of its neighbors.
True national progress requires a mental conversion. It demands that we stop measuring our elevation by the depth of another man’s pit. It requires us to understand that having a private borehole while your entire street drinks contaminated water is not wealth—it is living in a polished cage inside a neglected compound.
Until we despise systemic failure more than we enjoy our private exemptions from it, the “Nigeria of our dreams” will remain a slogan.
A nation only begins to work when its citizens realize that the ultimate luxury is not jumping the queue, but living in a society where nobody has to fight for a queue, to begin with.
#tochukwunkwocha
