AfriPulse
Nigeria works — But only because Nigerians do.
That is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the country’s economic story. Not that the nation is resilient, but that its people have been forced to become resilient in place of systems that do not work. Not that institutions function, but that individuals have learnt to endure their failures.
Nigeria is an economy powered by survival, an economy that runs on endurance, an economy where coping has quietly become national policy.
Every morning, millions wake not to pursue opportunity. Not to plan growth, but to anticipate how to survive a system’s breakdown.
In Nigeria, survival precedes strategy, and adjustment comes before ambition. Long before formal work begins, most Nigerians are already negotiating uncertainty — mentally, emotionally, and financially. This is the economics of constant uncertainty. This is what it means to live in a country where nothing is guaranteed.
When coping becomes a system
In functional societies, systems exist to reduce the burden on individuals. Infrastructure absorbs shocks. Institutions create predictability. Governance allows people to focus on value creation rather than damage control. In Nigeria, the reverse is true.
Here, institutional failure is outsourced to households. Citizens generate their own electricity, secure their own water, self-finance healthcare, arrange private security, and build personal solutions to public problems. What should be collective has become individual.
Nigerians do not plan for progress; they plan to survive system failure.
This is why people budget for institutional breakdown. Why does every household carry contingency costs? Why is daily life structured around “what if”? Governance failure has become a household expense.
According to the World Bank’s Nigeria Development Update (2023), over 85 percent of Nigerian firms rely on self-generated power, spending approximately $14 billion annually just to stay operational. This spending does not expand capacity. It does not improve competitiveness. It merely prevents collapse.
At the household level, the National Bureau of Statistics shows that Nigerians spend over 60 percent of their income on basic survival needs.
The economy Nigerians live in is not designed for accumulation; it is designed for coping. This is not resilience. It is an adaptation to dysfunction.
The mental load is taxing national output
The deepest damage of this reality is invisible. Nigeria is running a mentally-loaded economy.
Mental load is the continuous cognitive strain of planning, adjusting, recalculating, and worrying.
It is the cost of thinking too much about too little because too much is unstable. It is the burden of providing what the government should’ve provided.
In some states, especially Lagos. People wake before dawn not out of ambition, but because the city demands it — planning routes, budgeting volatile transport costs, anticipating congestion, adjusting schedules around failure. Productivity is lost before 9 am. Focus becomes a luxury. By the time work begins, many are already exhausted.
The World Health Organization links chronic uncertainty to reduced concentration and decision-making efficiency of up to 20 percent.
In Nigeria, uncertainty is not episodic; it is permanent. Multiply that loss across millions of workers, traders, artisans, and professionals, and the result is an economy quietly bleeding output every day. Burnout becomes an economic indicator. Exhaustion becomes national infrastructure.
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Why hard work does not translate to progress
This is why Nigerians work extraordinarily hard and yet feel stuck.
Survival mode shrinks ambition. When attention is consumed by daily adjustment, long-term thinking suffers. When energy is spent managing dysfunction, innovation is postponed. When effort goes into staying afloat, scale becomes elusive.
Nigeria competes at a disadvantage not because its people lack capacity, but because inefficiency eats opportunity before it can compound. Growth never feels like progress because effort is consumed by friction.
When governance is replaced by endurance
Coping persists because it works — just enough.
Nigerians are exceptionally adaptive. But adaptation has a hidden cost: it reduces pressure on institutions to improve. When people absorb failure quietly, dysfunction becomes normal.
Resilience is mistaken for success. Over time, trust shifts. Nigerians trust people more than systems because people respond. Informal networks outperform formal institutions because they deliver. The economy Nigerians built is one designed to survive the state, not rely on it. But an economy built to survive governance failure can never unlock its full potential.
The informal economy is holding the country together
Nowhere is this clearer than in Nigeria’s markets.
The cost of doing business the Nigerian way is high precisely because markets are compensating for institutional absence. This coping economy rewards adaptability but punishes scale. Nigeria struggles to turn survival into competitiveness. But informality is not the solution. It is a symptom.
The real price of normalising failure
Nigeria is functioning — but at what cost?
The price is paid in lost focus, delayed ambition, stunted growth, and exhausted people. The quiet damage of everyday dysfunction accumulates slowly, invisibly, relentlessly. It makes life heavier than it should be. It makes progress feel distant even when effort is intense.
This is why Nigeria feels tired.
This is why the economy feels thin.
This is why survival has replaced strategy.
An economy built on coping will always underperform its potential.
Nigeria’s greatest strength — the endurance of its people — has become the most expensive substitute for systems that should work. A country that functions only because people endure is asking too much of its citizens.
Survival is not a development strategy.
Endurance is not governance.
Resilience cannot replace institutions.
Until systems begin to carry the weight they were designed to bear, Nigerians will continue to work harder than necessary — and produce less than they could.
This is the economy behind the exhaustion.
This is the high cost of making life hard.
This is the price of normalising failure. And it is far higher than we are willing to admit.
Emmanuel C. Macaulay is a development thinker and writer who examines the unseen logic behind everyday realities — where leadership, systems, and design shape collective progress.
Source: Businessday.ng | Read the Full Story…
