By Idowu Adewara
There are millions of Nigerians who have never applied for a visa. Not because they have not dreamed of it, but because they cannot afford to dream that far. They are running businesses, raising children, caring for ageing parents, and paying for electricity they generate themselves. They are not waiting to be saved. They are simply waiting for a country that works.
Nigeria must work. Not merely a political statement, but as a genuine, urgent, non-negotiable national project. Because for every Nigerian with a foreign passport in a drawer, there are fifty more who have no such options. No safety net across the ocean. No fallback. Just this country, this soil, and the daily wager of their lives against a system that too often pays out in disappointment.
This piece is a moral appeal, a civic call, and an urgent reminder that a nation of over 200 million people cannot continue to survive on hope alone. A country cannot thrive on slogans, promises, or rhetoric. It must function through systems, institutions, accountability, and leadership that serve the people. Nigeria must work.
For decades, Nigerians have demonstrated resilience in the face of hardship. We have become experts at adaptation. We adjust to power outages by buying generators. We adapt to failing healthcare by seeking private hospitals or travelling abroad when possible. We endure poor roads, insecurity, unemployment, inflation, and policy inconsistency with a strength that is often celebrated.
One of our greatest national tragedies is that we have romanticized survival. Resilience is admirable, but resilience should not become a permanent substitute for governance. The ability of Nigerians to “manage” difficult situations should not excuse the failure of institutions. Citizens should not have to build personal alternatives for every public service that government ought to provide. A functioning country should not demand extraordinary endurance from ordinary people just to survive.
Nigeria possesses enormous human and natural wealth. We possess abundant natural resources, fertile land, a strategic location, and one of the youngest and most energetic populations in the world. Our people excel globally in business, technology, medicine, academics, arts, sports, and entrepreneurship. Nigerians continue to break barriers across continents.
This raises an important question: if Nigerians can thrive almost anywhere in the world, why does Nigeria struggle to work for Nigerians? The answer is that the greatest challenge has been the persistent failure of systems.
Let us be honest about what “Nigeria must work” actually means. It means the light must come on not sometimes or in certain neighbourhoods. It means every child born should have the same shot at a functioning school. It means a young graduate should not spend years idle, sending applications into a void, before concluding that the only viable option is to leave.
It means the courts must work. The roads must work. The ports must work. The policeman on the street must represent the law rather than circumvent it. These are not luxury demands. These are the minimum conditions for a society to hold together.
And holding together, let us be clear, is not guaranteed. There is a fragility to this moment that those in comfortable offices may not feel but that ordinary Nigerians sense every day in the cost of foodstuff, in the quiet exodus of doctors and engineers and teachers who used to hold institutions upright.
To be angry at Nigerians who japa is to misread the situation entirely. People do not abandon their homes, their languages, their foods, their families, lightly. They do so because the calculus became impossible. We should not be angry at them. We should be disturbed by the conditions that made leaving feel more rational than staying.
And we should be even more disturbed by what remains unsaid: that for most Nigerians, leaving is not an option at all. Visa costs, rejection rates, limited qualifications recognised abroad, and family responsibilities mean that for most Nigerians, leaving is not an option. The majority of this country’s people are here to stay and their lives, their dignity, their futures are entirely dependent on whether this country can be made to function. That is the weight of the phrase: millions who have nowhere else to go.
So who must make Nigeria work? The easy answer is “the government,” and it is not a wrong answer, it is simply an incomplete one. Government bears the primary obligation.
Elected and appointed officials who collect salaries and allowances from public funds have a contractual, constitutional, and moral duty to deliver governance. That must be said plainly, without apology. Accountability must be demanded, loudly, consistently, and at every level, local government, state, federal. The culture of impunity that allows a public official to run down an institution, loot a pension fund, or collect a salary for a job never done must be confronted, named, and punished. But governance does not happen only in Abuja. It happens in the decisions of the private sector employer who exploits desperate workers because the economy gives her the leverage to do so. It happens in the classroom where a teacher shows up, or does not. It happens in the boardroom where a contract is awarded cleanly, or not. It happens in each of us, every time we decide whether to cut a corner, pay a bribe, look the other way, or speak up.
Nigeria will not work until more of us decide that it must not as a wish, but as a standard we hold ourselves and each other to.
Making it work will require intentional effort from all stakeholders. A nation is not transformed because a government announces another policy. It is transformed when policies outlive administrations, when institutions become stronger than personalities, and when competence matters more than connections. The private sector must continue driving innovation while demanding better governance. Civil society and the media must keep speaking truth to power. Young people must remain engaged not only online, but in civic spaces where real change is shaped.
This is not a piece written from the place of those who believe everything is fine. Everything is not fine. The hunger is real. The frustration is legitimate. The grief of watching talent and potential drain out of this country, year after year, is a grief we share collectively.
But this is not a piece written from despair either, because despair serves no one still living here. The millions who wake every day and try who run small businesses against impossible odds, who teach children in under-resourced schools with overcrowded classrooms, who practice medicine with inadequate supplies, who farm land that the rain no longer treats predictably, do not have the luxury of despair.
We must also refuse hopelessness. Hopelessness breeds apathy. When citizens lose faith completely, they stop demanding better. They disengage. They settle for survival. They lower expectations. They stop imagining transformation. That is a dangerous place for any nation.
The trader deserves a functional economy. The teacher deserves dignity. The farmer deserves security. The young graduate deserves opportunity. The startup founder deserves infrastructure. The child born today deserves a future better than the present. They deserve better. Not eventually. Now.
Nigeria must work because the alternative is a country that fails its own people in plain sight, and we cannot afford to let that become something we simply accept. It must work. We must make it work. We owe it to those who never had the option to leave.
Idowu Adewara is a fellow of the Lateef Jakande Leadership Academy.