A man who has no concern for his community is not a man at all.
~ Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
There is a conversation Nigerians have with great fluency and almost no discomfort. It happens at dinner tables, in WhatsApp groups, at the barber’s shop, and in the comment sections beneath every news article about government failure. The conversation is about what is wrong with Nigeria and it is conducted, almost universally, in the third person. They have stolen the money. They have ruined the roads. They have destroyed what could have been. The pronoun is never we. The agent of failure is always elsewhere. And the speaker, having delivered their diagnosis with admirable precision, returns to their private life without the slightest sense that the diagnosis implicated them.
This note is an invitation to examine that pronoun.
The most durable excuse for civic disengagement in Nigeria is the scale of the failure. The reasoning runs and sounds like “the problems are enormous, the corruption is systemic, the political class is unreformable, and individual action is therefore futile. Why register to vote when the election will be rigged? Why pay your taxes when they will be stolen? Why report the pothole when nobody will come?” The logic is internally coherent. It is also, on examination, a circular argument that guarantees the very outcome it laments. A state whose citizens have collectively decided that participation is futile becomes, by that decision, ungovernable. The prediction fulfils itself. And the citizen who made it bears a share of the responsibility for the result, a share they will never acknowledge, because the excuse they gave at the beginning absolved them in advance.
There is a second excuse, more sophisticated and therefore more dangerous. It is the argument from precedence. Someone else must go first. The politicians must reform before citizens can engage. Institutions must work before compliance can be expected. Trust must be established before participation can be demanded. This formulation has a surface reasonableness that conceals a fundamental impossibility. Civic trust is not a precondition for civic action. It is a product of it. Institutions do not become trustworthy in a vacuum and then open their doors to citizen participation. They become trustworthy or fail to, precisely through the quality and pressure of citizen engagement over time. To wait for a government worthy of your participation before you participate is to wait for a fire to stop burning before you bring water.
The third excuse is perhaps the most quietly corrosive. It is the privatisation of responsibility. I take care of my family. I pay my children’s school fees because the public schools have failed. I got a generator and fixed an inverter system because “NEPA” and “Adelabu” cannot be relied upon. I drill a borehole because the water board has abdicated its duty. I do what I must for mine, and what the state owes the rest is the state’s problem. This is not an unreasonable response to genuine state failure. It is, in fact, an admirable demonstration of individual resilience. But it is not a civic virtue. It is its precise opposite, the withdrawal of civic energy from the commons into the private. Sadly, this is repeated across millions of households until the commons ceases to exist as a shared concern at all. A society composed entirely of people who have given up on public goods is a society that has given up on itself.
Civic responsibility is not a sentiment. It is not the feeling of patriotism that visits you on October 1st and departs by October 2nd. It is a practice. One that is specific, habitual, weighty and extremely costly. It costs the voter who stands in a queue for four hours in the sun and insists that their vote be counted. It costs the trader who refuses the official who demands a bribe before issuing a permit. It costs the professional who publishes the inconvenient finding, the community leader who calls out the contractor who poured water into the concrete, the parent who attends the school board meeting that none of the other parents attended. These are not heroic acts. They are ordinary acts, which is precisely what makes their collective abandonment so devastating. When ordinary people withdraw from ordinary civic acts, the space they vacate is not left empty. It is occupied, reliably and immediately, by those whose interests are served by the absence of scrutiny.
Ethics, in the civic sense, is not a matter of personal virtue alone. It is a matter of relational obligation. The acknowledgment that your membership in a community creates claims upon you that your private excellence cannot discharge. You may be the most honest person in your family, the most competent person in your office, the most generous person in your church. None of that constitutes civic ethics. Civic ethics begins where your private excellence ends and the demands of the shared life begin. It begins, precisely, in the places where it is inconvenient, where the personal cost of engagement is real and the personal benefit is diffused and long-deferred.
Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of capable, intelligent, well-intentioned people. It suffers from the systematic withdrawal of those people from the civic arena, justified by a set of excuses that are understandable, internally coherent, and collectively catastrophic. The country that results from this withdrawal is not a country that failed despite its citizens. It is a country that was built, brick by careful brick of private retreat, by them.
The invitation, then, is simple and without comfort. Stop speaking about Nigeria in the third person. The roads are ours to fix or to abandon. The institutions are ours to pressure or to ignore. The future is ours to contest or to concede. The question that civic responsibility places before every Nigerian regardless of class, education, age, or geography is not whether the country deserves their engagement. It is whether they deserve the country they are trying to build. That question has no comfortable answer. It was never meant to.