AIYEKOOTO : THE SURVIVAL HABIT

There is a strange thing about prolonged crisis. After a while, people stop recognising the habits it creates as survival habits. They simply become the way life is lived.

A family that once bought extra food because prices were rising begins to regard hoarding as ordinary prudence. A businessman who kept several sources of income because one job could disappear suddenly continues doing so long after the immediate danger has passed. A household that bought a generator because public electricity could not be trusted eventually regards private power as part of the normal cost of living. A young person who learnt never to depend entirely on one salary begins to treat every opportunity as something to seize before somebody else takes it.

These behaviours are not necessarily evidence of bad character.

Sometimes they are evidence of a society that has learnt, painfully, not to trust tomorrow.

That is why the President’s declaration that Nigeria is moving from economic emergency towards prosperity raises a question that statistics alone cannot answer:

What happens to a people whose survival instincts were formed by years of uncertainty when the emergency begins to recede?

Economic reform can change prices, markets, incentives and institutions. It cannot instantly change behaviour.

For years, Nigerians have been taught by experience to expect interruption. Electricity can disappear. Food prices can jump. Fuel can become scarce. Government policy can change without warning. A customer can delay payment. A public office can take months to deliver a service that should take days. A seemingly secure job can suddenly disappear.

In such an environment, people develop habits that make sense within the circumstances.

They stockpile. They diversify. They hedge. They avoid long commitments. They prefer liquidity. They distrust promises. They negotiate everything. They construct private alternatives to public failure.

The society gradually develops an informal operating system for surviving formal failure.

That operating system can be remarkably ingenious.

It can also become difficult to dismantle.

Consider the small businessman who has survived by buying and selling quickly because holding inventory was too risky. If economic conditions become more predictable, the old instinct may still tell him to turn over his stock immediately. The farmer who has been conditioned to expect poor roads, unreliable markets and arbitrary costs may hesitate to make the long term investment required for expansion. The household that has lived from one shock to another may find it difficult to plan for five years because the previous five years taught it to plan for Friday.

This is the psychology of an emergency economy.

And it carries an irony.

A survival strategy can become a constraint when the environment that produced it begins to change.

Hoarding that once protected a household from scarcity can deepen scarcity when everybody behaves the same way. Keeping every available resource in cash can provide security in uncertain times but discourage investment when productive opportunities emerge. Constantly searching for the next transaction can make it difficult to build the enterprise that requires patience. Distrusting institutions may once have been rational, but it can become an obstacle when those institutions begin to improve.

The old environment may disappear before the habits it produced.

That is one of the least discussed challenges in moving from reform to prosperity.

Prosperity requires a different relationship with tomorrow.

People must be able to save because they believe tomorrow will still have value. Businesses must be prepared to invest because they believe the rules will remain reasonably predictable. Farmers must be willing to plant for markets they expect to reach. Employers must be prepared to train workers they expect to retain. Families must be able to make long term decisions without calculating every decision against the possibility of the next economic shock.

In other words, prosperity requires confidence in continuity.

That may be harder to manufacture than money.

Government often defines reform in terms of laws, prices, institutions, programmes and fiscal measures. Those things matter. But every major economic disruption also leaves a behavioural residue.

People remember what happened to them.

A citizen who has repeatedly watched savings lose value may not immediately return to conventional saving simply because inflation falls. A manufacturer who has spent years operating around unreliable electricity may not immediately abandon private power arrangements because the grid improves. A consumer who has watched prices rise relentlessly may continue buying ahead of need because scarcity has become part of the household’s mental arithmetic. A business that has repeatedly encountered unpredictable regulation may remain cautious even after government introduces better rules.

That is why the transition from reform to prosperity requires more than policy announcements.

It requires trust to be rebuilt through repeated experience.

Not speeches.

Experience.

The electricity remains available month after month.

The road remains passable.

The price environment becomes predictable enough for businesses to plan.

Government contracts are honoured.

Taxes are administered consistently.

Rules do not change every time the political wind changes.

Public institutions deliver without requiring personal intervention.

A citizen gradually discovers that tomorrow no longer needs to be feared quite as much as yesterday.

That is how behaviour changes.

Not through exhortation, but through evidence.

There is an irony in the way Nigerians are sometimes described. We are called impatient, excessively transactional, opportunistic or insufficiently civic minded. Some criticisms may be justified in particular circumstances. But another explanation deserves attention.

People often behave according to the environment in which they have been forced to survive.

A society that repeatedly experiences scarcity develops scarcity behaviour.

A society that repeatedly experiences institutional uncertainty develops defensive behaviour.

A society that repeatedly experiences economic shocks develops short term behaviour.

Change the environment and eventually the behaviour can change too.

But eventually is the operative word.

The danger is that government may announce the end of an emergency while millions of citizens are still psychologically living inside it.

That gap matters.

If the new economic era is genuinely about prosperity, government has to do more than improve macroeconomic indicators. It has to create enough continuity for Nigerians to discover that long term behaviour is no longer foolish.

That is when a family can stop buying tomorrow’s food today.

When a business can invest rather than merely trade.

When a young person can build a career rather than constantly search for the next escape route.

When an entrepreneur can think beyond the next transaction.

When citizens begin to trust institutions enough to use them rather than circumvent them.

And perhaps that is the quietest measure of whether the emergency really is over.

Not whether Nigerians have forgotten the hardship.

They should not.

Memory is useful.

The real test is whether Nigerians can finally afford to make plans that the old economy taught them not to make.

A country does not become prosperous merely when its people earn more.

It becomes prosperous when its people can plan further ahead without feeling foolish for doing so.

A country can leave an economic emergency before it leaves the psychology of emergency.

The first requires reform.

The second requires Nigerians to see, repeatedly and convincingly, that the reform has become reality.

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