HAVE WE ACCEPTED THE UNUSUAL AS NORMAL?

By Lanre Ogundipe

There is a dangerous point in the life of a people when what once caused outrage begins to produce only a shrug.

Nigeria may be getting there.

We have become accustomed to too much. We have learnt to negotiate with dysfunction, improvise around failure and laugh at circumstances that should ordinarily make us angry. We call ourselves resilient, and indeed Nigerians are. But there is a question we have not asked often enough: resilient for what, and for how long?

A people can be resilient without becoming resigned.

That distinction is becoming important.

The Nigerian does not easily surrender. When electricity fails, he finds an alternative. When transport becomes unbearable, he finds another route. When a public service collapses, he looks for a private solution. When bureaucracy erects a wall, he searches for the person who knows somebody who can open a door.

He survives.

He improvises.

He moves on.

And perhaps therein lies one of our greatest strengths. But it may also have become one of our greatest weaknesses.

Because every time citizens devise a private solution to a public failure, the failure itself can become easier for those responsible to ignore.

The generator keeps the household running while the electricity problem remains unresolved.

The private hospital keeps the patient alive while the public health system deteriorates.

The private school provides an escape while public education struggles.

The personal connection gets a document moving while the bureaucracy remains clogged.

The businessman finds a way around an impossible operating environment while the underlying regulatory problem survives.

The Nigerian survives the system.

But who fixes the system?

That is the question.

We have become so accustomed to finding our way around broken institutions that we sometimes celebrate the workaround more enthusiastically than we demand the repair.

This is where the national celebration of resilience needs some examination.

Resilience is admirable when it enables people to withstand adversity without surrendering hope or dignity. But resilience becomes a dangerous word when it is used to make permanent hardship sound acceptable.

A mother who stretches a household income until it can barely stretch any further is resilient.

A young man who creates three sources of income because one salary cannot sustain him is resilient.

A trader who keeps returning to the market despite rising costs, weak infrastructure and shrinking purchasing power is resilient.

But none of these facts makes the conditions that require such resilience satisfactory.

Why should extraordinary endurance be necessary for ordinary living?

That is the question we should be asking.

Instead, we have developed a national vocabulary for accommodating the unacceptable.

“Manage it.”

“Find your way.”

“Everybody does it.”

“Who are you going to complain to?”

“That is Nigeria.”

That last one may be the most dangerous.

“That is Nigeria” is not an explanation. It is surrender disguised as familiarity.

It turns a problem into an identity and failure into destiny.

A bad road becomes Nigeria.

A corrupt official becomes Nigeria.

A broken process becomes Nigeria.

An abandoned public facility becomes Nigeria.

A queue that cannot move becomes Nigeria.

A service that should be guaranteed but must be privately purchased becomes Nigeria.

We say it, laugh and continue.

But what exactly are we accepting?

Government certainly bears the heavier responsibility. The state possesses the power to make institutions function. It collects taxes, makes laws, regulates industries, controls public resources and appoints those entrusted with administering them.

When government fails, the consequences are not abstract.

People lose time.

Businesses lose money.

Families spend more than they should.

Patients suffer.

Children lose opportunities.

Investors become cautious.

Citizens lose confidence.

And when these failures persist long enough, people stop expecting better.

That is when institutional failure acquires something more dangerous than permanence.

It acquires acceptance.

Yet citizens cannot escape the mirror.

We have also learnt to participate in the disorder when it suits us.

The man who complains about corruption may still look for a connection when he needs something done.

The person who condemns indiscipline may ignore the traffic rule when nobody is watching.

The citizen who complains about dirty streets may throw refuse into the drainage channel.

The businessman who demands fair regulation may seek an unfair advantage when it benefits him.

We cannot demand a decent society while reserving the right to behave indecently whenever circumstances permit.

There is no contradiction in demanding more from government while demanding more from ourselves.

In fact, both demands are necessary.

But let nobody use the language of civic responsibility to shift the burden of governance onto citizens.

A citizen cannot repair a collapsed bridge by being more responsible.

A mother cannot produce electricity by becoming more civic minded.

A patient cannot manufacture medicine because a hospital has failed.

A small business cannot build a functioning port.

Citizenship is not a substitute for governance.

Government must govern.

Institutions must work.

Officials must account for what belongs to the public.

At the same time, citizens must stop treating every law as optional and every public resource as somebody else’s property.

The country needs both institutional discipline and civic discipline.

What worries me most is what this accommodation is teaching the young.

Children do not learn citizenship from speeches alone. They watch.

They watch adults find ways around rules.

They watch public property treated as nobody’s property.

They watch people condemn corruption publicly and celebrate access to it privately.

They watch the honest person wait while the connected person goes ahead.

They watch the person who follows procedure struggle while the person who knows somebody gets served.

Eventually, a lesson settles in.

The system is not something to respect.

It is something to outsmart.

That is how a culture reproduces itself.

The child who grows up seeing rules circumvented may eventually become the official who expects them to be circumvented. The citizen who learns that influence is more useful than procedure may one day become the person selling influence.

Then we ask why the system does not change.

It does not change because the system has become a collection of people who have learnt to survive one another.

That is not resilience.

That is institutional exhaustion.

Nigeria must therefore be careful about romanticising its people’s capacity to endure.

There is nothing glorious about a citizen spending half a day solving a problem that should have taken half an hour.

There is nothing admirable about a family permanently budgeting for services that government should provide efficiently.

There is nothing inspirational about a business surviving conditions that would have destroyed a better organised economy.

There is nothing patriotic about enduring preventable hardship without demanding an end to it.

Resilience should keep a people standing. It should not keep bad systems standing.

That distinction is worth defending.

We should celebrate the Nigerian who refuses to give up. But we should equally challenge the circumstances that repeatedly require him to refuse to give up.

We should praise ingenuity without allowing ingenuity to become an excuse for government incompetence.

We should recognise survival without confusing survival with development.

And we should stop using familiarity to excuse wrongdoing.

The unusual does not become normal because it happens every day.

A broken system repeated for twenty years is still broken.

A corrupt practice repeated by thousands remains corrupt.

An injustice suffered by millions does not become less unjust because people have learnt to live with it.

And a nation does not become stronger merely because its people have become extraordinarily good at absorbing punishment.

There is a limit to what a people should be expected to endure.

The challenge before Nigeria is therefore not simply to make Nigerians more resilient.

They already are.

The challenge is to build a country in which resilience is no longer the principal strategy for obtaining ordinary necessities.

We need institutions that work before citizens are forced to devise alternatives.

We need laws that are enforced before people learn to ignore them.

We need public services that function before private substitutes become the only dependable option.

We need leadership that accepts responsibility before citizens are told once again to manage.

And we need citizens who understand that the country cannot be repaired entirely from above.

Somebody must refuse the shortcut.

Somebody must respect the queue.

Somebody must protect the public facility.

Somebody must reject the bribe.

Somebody must insist that a rule applies to him even when nobody is watching.

That is where national renewal begins, not in grand declarations, but in the refusal to make peace with what should never have become normal.

Nigeria’s greatest resource may indeed be the resilience of its people.

But we should not abuse that resource.

A people may survive almost anything. That does not give those who impose the hardship a licence to impose it forever.

Resilience is a virtue.

It is not a national policy.

Lanre Ogundipe, Public Affairs Analyst, former President of the Nigeria and Africa Union of Journalists, writes from Abuja.