A Generous Nation and Broken State
Walk through any market in Ibadan on a Friday afternoon and you will see a trader quietly setting aside food for the woman who could not afford hers, a random person paying a sick stranger’s hospital bill, a neighbourhood pooling money to bury someone nobody really knew. Nigerians are, by instinct and by necessity, a generous people. We give because we were raised to give. We give because our faith demands it. We give because, in the absence of the state, giving is often the only thing standing between a neighbour and catastrophe.
And yet, something is deeply wrong with a society that relies on charity to do the work of governance.
Generosity is a virtue and I am not making an argument against it. This is an argument about the difference between a gift and a right, and about why confusing the two has cost ordinary Nigerians, and citizens across the developing world, more than they can afford to lose.
What the Social Contract Actually Says
The social contract is a practical arrangement embedded in the constitution. Citizens surrender certain freedoms to act unilaterally, to govern themselves alone and in return, the state guarantees certain things such as security, justice, basic services, and the conditions under which a person can build a dignified life. This is not a new idea. John Locke argued in the seventeenth century that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Jean-Jacques Rousseau built on this by saying that the contract is binding on both sides. The citizen owes the state while the state owes the citizen.
What the contract does not say is that a wealthy member of the community may, out of the goodness of his heart, choose to build the road your children walk to school on. Or that a church may elect to run the only functional clinic in your ward. Or that a politician may, in the months before an election, distribute bags of rice to families who have not eaten properly all year. These are all acts of charity. They may be sincere. They may save lives. But they are not rights. And when they substitute for rights, they corrode the very architecture of accountability that makes a functioning state possible.
The Data Behind the Dependence
Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics reported in 2022 that over 133 million Nigerians which represents roughly 63 percent of the population live in multidimensional poverty. The World Health Organisation estimates that out-of-pocket spending accounts for more than 70 percent of total health expenditure in Nigeria. This means that most families, when illness arrives, reach first into their own pockets, then into the pockets of relatives, then into the charity of whoever is willing to give. We see this on social media everyday where people crowdfund for strangers. The state is, in the most direct sense, absent from that moment.
In education, UNESCO data from 2023 places Nigeria among the countries with the highest number of out-of-school children globally. The numbers are over 10 million. Many of the schools that do function in rural communities across the country owe their existence not to NGO interventions or the private philanthropy of individuals. It is an indictment of the state.
The same pattern repeats itself across Sub-Saharan Africa. The 2023 Human Development Report by the UNDP found that the region continues to record the lowest scores globally on indicators of basic service delivery. Yet, informal giving networks remain extraordinarily robust. Our social capital is on an all-time high. People give to survive. But giving to survive is not the same as living with rights.
Why Charity Is Not Enough
Charity has three structural limitations that make it incapable of replacing the social contract.
First, charity is discretionary. A right exists whether or not someone is feeling generous today. A child’s access to a functioning public school does not depend on the mood of a benefactor. A patient’s right to emergency treatment should not hinge on whether a wealthy donor happens to be in the neighbourhood. Rights are binding. Charity isn’t. While noble, it is still voluntary. When your survival depends on the latter, you are not a citizen.
Second, charity is unequal. It flows towards those who are visible, sympathetic, or connected to the giver. My observation on philanthropic behaviour consistently shows that charitable giving tends to favour communities that are already better off. More urban, better educated, more politically visible. The rural farmer in Benue State, the internally displaced widow in Plateau, the girl who drops out of school in FCT because there is no one to pay the small fees that remain, these people are often invisible to the networks of benevolence. Rights, by design, are universal. Charity, by nature, is selective.
Third, and most critically, charity erodes accountability. When a politician builds a borehole in your community, you are grateful. Gratitude is a powerful emotion. But gratitude also has a way of binding the beneficiaries to their benefactor. It makes it harder to hold that same politician accountable for the five years in which no government borehole was built, public water supply maintained, or infrastructure plan delivered. The politics of charity is precisely the mechanism by which weak states reproduce themselves. The powerful give enough to remain useful. The people receive enough to remain compliant. The structural conditions that produce poverty remain untouched.
The Citizen Who Knows the Difference
There is a specific kind of civic literacy that changes everything. The ability to distinguish between what the state owes you and what someone is doing out of kindness. This distinction is transformative. Both in approach and demands.
Consider the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in the 1990s. Facing severe urban inequality and infrastructure deficits not unlike what many Nigerian cities face today, the city government introduced a programme of participatory budgeting, a process by which citizens directly voted on how public funds were allocated. Within a decade, the share of residents with access to clean water rose from 75 to 98 percent. Sanitation coverage expanded from 46 to 85 percent. School enrollment grew by 150 percent. None of this happened because wealthy residents decided to be generous. It happened because citizens understood that public resources were their right, demanded accountability for how those resources were used, and were given institutional mechanisms to exercise that demand.
When citizens claim their rights, it becomes a policy of the government. Charity, however generous, cannot replicate this dynamic. It lacks the institutional permanence, democratic legitimacy, and redistributive force that only the state when held to account by its citizens can deliver.
Permit me to say benevolence has its place. And that place is not at the centre of the entire puzzle.
Let us be clear about what this argument is not saying. It is not saying that generosity is wrong. It is not saying that the trader who feeds her neighbour should stop, or that the diaspora doctor who builds a clinic in his hometown is wasting his money. Human solidarity is among the finest things we do. In communities where the state has failed completely and suddenly, after a conflict, or after an economic collapse, charity fills a gap that cannot be left empty. It saves lives in the interim. It holds communities together while the longer work of state reconstruction proceeds.
The argument is about priority and about narrative. When a society begins to treat charity as the primary mechanism for delivering services, it has accepted the failure of the contract. It has decided, consciously or not, that some citizens are entitled to rights and others are eligible only for goodwill. This is not a stable foundation for a republic.
What We Owe Each Other
Section 14(2)(b) of the Nigerian Constitution declares that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.” This is a legal obligation. And it is one that every government sworn into office inherits. The question is not whether Nigerian citizens deserve clean water, functional schools, accessible healthcare, and safe roads. Nigerians do. The question is whether the political class and the citizens who elect them are prepared to insist that these things are delivered as rights, and to hold the state accountable when they are not.
The generous man who builds a school deserves our admiration. But the society that depends on him to do what the government should have done deserves our urgent attention. We cannot vote for better governance with gratitude in our hearts for a bag of rice. We cannot build a republic on the shifting ground of benevolence.
Charity is the last resort of the kind-hearted in the face of state failure. The social contract is the first responsibility of a functioning democracy. We must learn and insist on the difference.