I often observe how many people choose to play the ostrich by burying their heads in moral comfort to attack, Nigeria for what they perceive as disappointment, failure, crisis, lack of unity, or arrested progress. In doing so, they consciously or unconsciously promote a strange idea: that a country can be bad without its people being bad. It is a convenient illusion, one that allows indignation without introspection.
My suspicion is that this habitual portrayal of Nigeria as the problem, carefully wrapped in moral outrage or emotional language, is less about patriotism and more about blame-shifting. It reflects an unwillingness to accept the unsettling possibility of personal and collective complicity. After all, it is easier to condemn an abstract entity than to confront oneself. “Nigeria” becomes a lifeless scapegoat, castigated for failures that can only exist through human action, while Nigerians quietly absolve themselves of responsibility for the very conditions they lament.
In Nigeria, everyone seems to blame someone else for the nation’s troubles. Rarely does anyone pause to consider the likelihood of being part of the challenge, the everyday bad attitudes, the erosion of trust, selfishness, disregard for rules, favoritism, tribalism, negligence of duty, and the normalization of shortcuts. These are not abstract forces; they are human behaviors, repeated daily, that collectively produce what we later diagnose as national failure.
Strictly speaking, Nigeria is little more than geography, land endowed with abundant material resources, a favorable climate, diverse ecological zones, and regions that complement one another in balancing natural endowments. Geography does not steal public funds, subvert rules, rig processes, or excuse incompetence. People do.
Yet whenever problems arise, the reflex is to shout “Nigeria!” instead of saying “Nigerians.” This linguistic choice is not innocent. It reveals a deeper hypocrisy: a refusal to accept fault, to shoulder responsibility, or to admit proximity to the problem. By locating failure far away in the name, the map, the abstraction, we symbolically raise our hands as if to say, “I am not among the guilty.”
When the country itself can no longer be conveniently blamed, leadership becomes the next scapegoat. Leaders are alternately demonized as villains or celebrated as heroes, depending on personal interests, ethnic alignments, or shifting emotional narratives. The standards applied are often contradictory and elastic, reinvented to suit private perceptions of justice and merit. Once again, the problem is revealed not as geography or nomenclature, but as people, the citizens who excuse what benefits them and condemn what does not.
This pattern amounts to a subtle massaging of conscience. By refusing to interrogate how individual actions that directly or indirectly contribute to national flaws, attention is diverted to an invisible, faceless enemy called “Nigeria.” It becomes an imaginary adversary, absorbing blame that rightly belongs to human choices, values, and character.Perhaps it would be more honest, even therapeutic, to say “Nigerians” whenever something goes wrong. Doing so forces proximity. It collapses the distance between diagnosis and responsibility. It reminds us that the problem is not somewhere out there; it is also in here.
Professor Jideofor Adibe, a political scientist at Nasarawa State University, Keffi, captures part of this crisis through the concept of “de-Nigerianisation.” He links secessionist agitations, insurgency, terrorism, banditry, and corruption to poor nation-building, arguing that many citizens now perceive the state as an enemy rather than a shared project. In his book Nigeria without Nigerians, Adibe contends that deep-seated problems such as corruption, ethnic tensions, and poor leadership have weakened national attachment, pushing people to identify more with ethnic or regional affiliations than with Nigeria itself. He further suggests that this disconnection is fueled by marginalization, insecurity, and frustration with the government’s failure to address pressing issues, insisting that Nigeria’s core challenge is a crisis of nation-building rather than isolated governance failures.
The analysis is thoughtful and illuminating, yet it advances a familiar but deeply problematic framing. It treats alienation primarily as a reaction to state failure and implies that re-nationalising Nigerians depends largely on what the government must do better: deliver security, fairness, inclusion, and good governance. While this captures an important dimension of the crisis, it is analytically incomplete and normatively risky because it quietly absolves citizens of their co-creative role in nation-building.
The argument leans heavily on a top-down conception of nationhood, casting the state as the principal moral agent and citizens as largely passive victims to be re-won or persuaded back into loyalty. This framing subtly treats Nigerians as if they exist outside the state they criticize, rather than as everyday producers of the very social realities they condemn. Yet states do not fail in a vacuum. Institutions are staffed, sustained, manipulated, resisted, or sabotaged by citizens operating within particular value systems and moral horizons.
By foregrounding what government has failed to do, the analysis sidelines a more uncomfortable but crucial question: what kind of citizens does Nigeria have, and how do their attitudes, norms, and behaviors reproduce the dysfunction they attribute solely to leadership? Feelings of marginalization and insecurity are real, but the language of “de-Nigerianisation” risks oversimplifying the moral economy of disaffection. Self-interest, opportunism, and selective morality often disguise themselves as principled alienation. Many disavow Nigeria not because they oppose injustice in principle, but because injustice has not favored them. The same individuals who denounce corruption when excluded frequently celebrate it when it benefits them ethnically, politically, or personally.
This contradiction exposes a deeper problem: citizen hypocrisy. There is a coexistence of high moral expectations of the state and low moral discipline in private and communal life. Nation-building cannot flourish where integrity is demanded from leaders while bribery, nepotism, exam malpractice, favoritism, and rule-bending are normalized at the grassroots. As political theorists remind us, no society can sustainably rise above the ethical floor set by its dominant social norms.
Moreover, the analysis tends to conflate nation-building with government performance, overlooking a basic sociological insight: nations are built as much in homes, schools, markets, religious spaces, and peer networks as in ministries and policies. Values such as civic responsibility, tolerance, delayed gratification, public-spiritedness, and respect for rules are not manufactured by the state alone. When citizens are deeply materialistic, impatient, ethnocentric, and transactional, even the best policies are distorted at the point of implementation.
In this sense, poor governance is not only a cause of weak national cohesion; it is also a symptom of deeper cultural and moral failures. Leadership often reflects society more than it reforms it. By failing to rigorously engage this reciprocal relationship, the argument risks reinforcing a culture of blame that externalizes responsibility and weakens civic agency.
The emphasis on ethnic and regional identification as evidence of de-Nigerianisation also underestimates how citizens actively weaponize identity for personal and group advantage. In Nigeria, ethnicity is not merely a refuge from exclusion; it is often a strategic tool for rent-seeking, moral exemption, and accountability evasion. Citizens excuse the failures of “their own” leaders while condemning identical failures by others, a practice that corrodes national solidarity more effectively than state neglect alone.
Ultimately, the implicit solution logic: “fix the state and citizens will return” rests on a questionable assumption that loyalty precedes responsibility. History often suggests the reverse. Nations consolidate not only when governments perform well, but when citizens cultivate shared standards, civic sacrifice, and moral consistency, even under imperfect leadership. Without this, improved governance may yield short-term gains but not lasting cohesion. This is why I am reminded of John F. Kennedy’s famous inaugural admonition: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” The wisdom of this statement lies not in excusing state failure, but in insisting on shared responsibility.
Citizens’ disappointment with Nigeria is understandable. Their frustration explains why the country is blamed, mocked, or despised. Yet the more honest position is to admit that these are not merely the failures of a country, but of its people and its leadership alike. To say “Nigeria has failed” is comforting; to say “Nigerians have failed” is sobering, because it acknowledges personal implication. It forces us to search for solutions rooted not only in expectations of others, but in shared values, personal discipline, and collective responsibility.
Nigeria cannot be great if everyone waits for someone else to do the right thing while privately justifying moral lapses. Nigeria does not exist without Nigerians. Hating the country or calling it names may provide emotional relief, but no one can realistically confront its problems without the courage to identify the people—leaders and citizens alike as central to both the failure and the remedy. To insist otherwise is to continue using Nigeria as a scapegoat for shortcomings we are unwilling to face in ourselves.
Bagudu can be reached at bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or on 0703 494 3575.
