The System Is Working… What's the Problem?

Imagine someone buys a car. Great car, properly maintained, runs exactly as it should. They use the right fuel, service it regularly, treat it with the care the machine requires. A marvel of human engineering. Surely, it can only get better?

But then they hand it over. The new owner means well, but they don't really understand how it works. They start filling it with kerosene because it's cheaper. They don't fix the tires because they look fine from the outside. They replace parts occasionally but never the right ones, never in the right order.

The car continues to work. Mostly. There's a creak now and again, some buildup in the exhaust pipe, the occasional jerk, one warning light becomes two. Slowly, then faster. It's manageable, so we adapt. Till eventually it breaks down completely, and everyone stands around asking what went wrong.

Nothing went wrong.

The car responded exactly as its maintenance allowed. The problem was never the machine.

Nigeria's system isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it's been allowed to do.

That's the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to sit with. When you look at the corruption, the infrastructure failures, the money that disappears, the projects that never get completed — your instinct is to call it a broken system. But a broken system is one that fails to do what it was designed to do. Nigeria's system is doing exactly what it has been allowed to do. The problem isn't the system. The problem is that your expectations don't match what the system is actually built to produce.

We need to have a discussion about what systems actually are, because we've been operating with the wrong definition for a long time.

A system isn't just a constitution. It isn't just laws or agencies or ministries or government departments. Those things are components. A system is the architecture that determines what behavior becomes normal, what choices become convenient, and what outcomes become inevitable. Systems determine what people view as good. They shape how people rationalise their decisions, what they prioritize, and what they're willing to tolerate.

A carefully designed system makes the rational choice the convenient one. A poorly designed system — or one that has simply been left to drift — makes convenience the only available choice, regardless of whether that convenience is good for anyone else. Take a system where stealing electricity through an illegal bypass makes more financial sense than paying an unaffordable bill. A system where buying your way through school is easier than earning your way through it. Where bribing an official gets things done faster than following due process. Where corruption is usually the logical choice. These are rational responses to an irrational architecture.

The system produces that behavior and rewards it.

Given any random group of people, most of them will default to whatever is most convenient. That isn't a moral failing. That's just how people work. The key insight in any functional society is that you design the system so that convenience and correctness point in the same direction.

You make corruption absurd by comparison — not by appealing to people's better nature, but by making the architecture of the system actively hostile to corrupt behavior. When you don't do that, when you leave the design work undone, people fill the vacuum with whatever works for them personally.

We Do Have a System

I've had a conversation about this where someone told me we don't have a system. That's wrong. We absolutely have a system. It's just that the system we have is not the one we think we have, and it is not the one we need. The current system favors opacity over accountability, personal loyalty over merit, and short-term extraction over long-term investment.

It's the predictable output of an architecture nobody ever deliberately designed to produce anything different.

My favorite exercise in any political conversation recently has been to ask the other person a simple question: what do you think would actually solve Nigeria's problems?

It's almost never a comprehensive answer. It's always one thing: agriculture, industrialisation, commoditising cash crops, locally refining our crude oil. One single intervention that will supposedly unlock everything else. And in most cases the answer isn't even a policy. It's a person. It's essentially saying: I don't know what it takes to fix this country, but this person definitely does.

Disappointing as it might be, this is the logical output of a system where nobody has ever seen a comprehensive solution work. You can only imagine solutions within the range of what you've experienced. If your entire reference frame is "strong man fixes things," then your answer will always be a strong man. The system produced that imagination failure just as surely as it produced everything else.

This is why the tribal loyalty argument frustrates me. And it's not because it's wrong, but because it stops too early. When you see a significant portion of the Nigerian population supporting an administration primarily because of shared ethnicity or religion, the easy conclusion is that those people are being irrational or stupid. But they're not. They're being completely rational given the environment the system has created.

The one thing you can always trust is that people will act in their own self interest. So when you see people repeatedly acting against it only to complain for four to eight years and do the same thing again, that's a sign to look deeper.

Borrowed Pedigree

Here's what's actually happening.

Most people supporting a president don't know him directly. They don't know what his family is like, what he's like in private, the full record of what he's done. But they know what their pastor is like. They know what their parents are like. They know what their community elders are like. And that group of people — those trusted figures — supports him. So the credibility people have built toward the institutions they can verify gets transferred, along tribal and religious lines, to someone they can't.

It's borrowed pedigree.

And it works because the alternative — forming an independent judgment based on the actual record — requires data points that the system has never made available to most people.

When the assumption is that supporting your tribe costs you nothing while giving you the pride of solidarity, it remains a net positive for most people. The calculation only changes when people fully understand what it has actually cost them. And that's the trap the system sets: it keeps people in a state where making that fully informed choice is hard if not impossible. The lack of transparency is a core feature — not a bug.

When formal institutions have failed you consistently enough, you stop trusting them and you start trusting what you can verify — your community, your church, your ethnic network. The system produced that adaptation.

You can't fix the adaptation without fixing the system that made it the sensible response.

It Is Disgustingly Easy

Recently there was a conversation about whether it was even possible to turn Nigeria around in one term. My position was simple: it is disgustingly easy.

Not easy in the sense of requiring no effort, but easy in the sense that the solution is not mysterious. The pushback on my response was immediate and fair.

It does sound like Dunning-Kruger in its purest form. Someone with no political office claiming they could fix what billions in funding and decades of PhD research couldn't. I heard the argument. I recognised the apparent arrogance in it. But here's where the argument fails: it treats all previous attempts as equivalent without looking at the details of how they failed.

And the devil, as always, is in the details.

The billions that have been donated to Nigerian reform didn't disappear into thin air. They went somewhere specific. They went through the government. The same corrupt architecture that the funding was supposed to fix was the architecture controlling where the funding went. The researchers who spent years producing the best available thinking on Nigerian governance — they produced genuine work. But they were never at the helm. The knowledge existed. The resources existed.

The bottleneck was always the same thing: the person at the top, and the system that put them there.

Most of the people who have held real power in Nigeria's post-independence history had neither the education nor the conceptual framework to understand how advanced governance systems work. The operating assumption has consistently been that you fix problems by throwing money at them, and you get people to do things by telling them to do it.

Neither of those things works. They have never worked. But the system keeps selecting for people who believe they do, because the system was never designed to select for anything else.

The Solutions Already Exist

What makes this particularly difficult to escape is that almost every single problem Nigeria has can be pointed to somewhere in the world where it has already been solved. The solutions exist. They are documented, tested, and proven. What doesn't exist is the incentive to implement them. And somehow, every election cycle, we recycle more people who have no such incentive — people who make promises knowing those promises will dissolve, and face no real consequence when they do.

The urgency never arrives because people don't fully understand what they're losing. And when you don't understand what you're losing, you start to believe that whatever a politician takes for themselves they've somehow earned.

You accept what you're told, and the cycle resets.

There's a phrase that circulates online these days — that Nigerians don't have a breaking point, that they're always ready to adapt. It gets said like a joke, or worse, like an indictment of the people themselves. But it isn't stupidity. It's the most predictable output of a system that has spent decades making adaptation the only available response.

The resilience is real. But the tragedy is what it's being spent on.

This is the point. The one major bottleneck in Nigeria has never been funding. It has never been research. It has never been the talent of ordinary Nigerians, who are demonstrably capable of extraordinary things when the environment supports them.

The bottleneck is leadership selection — and when you look at how the current system is designed to select leadership, it becomes obvious why the outputs have been so consistent. You get what the system is built to produce.

What Actually Needs to Change

With the next election approaching, I find myself thinking about this more deliberately. It's possible that the current administration continues. It's possible that something different emerges. But I'm less interested in who wins than in whether whoever wins understands something fundamental: that good intentions without systems architecture is just noise. Nigeria has had enough well-intentioned noise.

What it needs is a deliberate, buildable accountability infrastructure — one that doesn't rely on the virtue of the person at the top, but that structurally makes corruption harder, more visible, and more permanently costly than it currently is.

I've written that construction manual, and I'll leave you with this: if someone told you that the answer to everything you've been complaining about your entire life was sitting in a 60-page document, would you read it?

Or is that too much to ask.

Governing by Data: A Systems Framework for Accountable Public Administration in Nigeria.