I woke up this morning doing what I probably shouldn’t do first thing. Reading Nigerian news. Same headlines, different day. Election results that change nothing. Court rulings that surprise nobody. Budgets that don’t add up. And then somewhere in all of it, a phrase just hit me. No one is coming to save us. I put my phone down, made my coffee, and sat with it for a long time.
Because the thing is, I’ve felt versions of this before, after every election, after every strike, after every kidnapping headline, after every news cycle that ends exactly where it started, but this morning felt different and I couldn’t shake it. Frustration is an understatement, because frustration implies you still believe things could go another way. This was something else, like I’d been watching the same film for over thirty years and had finally, reluctantly, understood what it was actually about.
Nigeria turns 66 this year, and for most of those years, the conversation has been the same one, that we have bad leaders, that if we just got the right person in power things would change, that corruption is the disease and free and fair elections are the cure, yada yada yada, and for a long time I believed that, a lot of us did. But sitting with my coffee this morning, I kept thinking about a different question, not who is running the country, but who the country was built to serve in the first place.
Start with the slave trade. Before the British built a single road or drew a single border, the coast of what we now call Nigeria was already part of a system, and that system was extraction. Millions of people taken from this coastline alone, shipped across the Atlantic, their labour building economies that are still wealthy today while the places they were taken from are still recovering. And the thing that doesn’t get said enough is that it worked because of collaboration, because there were always African intermediaries willing to trade their own people for guns and alcohol and a seat at a table that was never really theirs, and when the slave trade ended, those same structures of collaboration didn’t disappear, they simply changed their purpose.
When the slave trade ended, the British didn’t leave, they stayed and called it something else. They drew borders that made no cultural or ethnic sense, splitting communities in half and forcing others together who had never been one people, not because they were careless but because the borders weren’t drawn for us, they were drawn for them, to make administration and extraction easier. And when independence finally came in 1960, what was handed over wasn’t really a country in the full sense of the word, it was a set of institutions designed to serve someone else’s interests, with a new flag on top.
Independence gave Nigeria a flag and a seat at the United Nations, but the economic architecture stayed largely intact, and over the decades new players arrived to work within it. In 1986, the IMF and World Bank pushed Nigeria into a Structural Adjustment Program that devalued the naira, cut social spending, and opened the economy to foreign competition that local industries couldn’t survive, and the poverty that followed wasn’t a side effect, it was a predictable outcome of a system designed to keep raw materials cheap and markets open. Today the mechanisms are more polished but the logic is the same. France signed an agreement in December 2025 to help digitise Nigeria’s tax collection system, while fourteen francophone African countries are still trying to escape French control of their currencies. The United States maintains military infrastructure across West Africa framed as counterterrorism but positioned precisely around oil routes. China finances infrastructure with loan terms that put national assets on the line when repayments fail. Different players, same game.
And so people leave steadily, in a way that has started to feel less like individual choice and more like a slow collective conclusion, and the people leaving are not the ones who gave up, they are often the ones who tried the hardest, the doctors who worked in understaffed hospitals with no equipment, the engineers who built things in a system that kept dismantling them, the teachers who taught in universities that went on strike for eight months because the government wouldn’t honour agreements it had signed, the parents who stopped feeling safe in their own country and couldn’t find a good reason to keep pretending otherwise, and eventually a person sits down one day and starts filling out forms for the UK or Canada or Germany, not because they stopped loving where they came from but because they finally stopped believing that where they came from would ever love them back or protect them.
What makes it harder to swallow is watching the people in power perform a different calculation entirely, because the same politicians who stand at podiums and talk about Nigeria’s potential and Nigerian resilience have been quietly making arrangements for their children that have nothing to do with faith in this country, their children are in universities in the UK and the US and Canada, getting the kind of education that Nigerian public universities have been too underfunded and too strike-ridden to reliably provide, their medical emergencies are handled in hospitals abroad, their money sits in accounts abroad, and yet they return to the microphone and ask the rest of us to believe, to invest, to stay, to be patient, as if patience is a strategy and not just another word for accepting things as they are.
And this is the question I keep coming back to, the one I don’t really want to ask but can’t stop asking, which is whether any of this was ever meant to work out differently, because when you trace it all the way back, from the slave trade to the colonial borders to the structural adjustment programs to the tax deals being signed today, what you see is not a country that tried and failed, you see a geography that was designed for extraction from the very beginning, and what we call dysfunction, the collapsed hospitals, the universities on permanent strike, the courts that protect nobody, the elections that change nothing, might not be dysfunction at all, it might be the system working exactly as it was designed to work, just not for us.
So where does that leave us, those of us who stayed and those of us who left and those of us living somewhere in between, still sending money home, still watching the news first thing in the morning even when we know it’s going to be bad, still arguing about Nigeria at dinner tables in London and Bonn and Toronto as if the argument itself is a form of love. No one is coming to save us, and I think part of me has always known that, but knowing it and sitting with it are different things, and what I’m slowly making peace with is that salvation was never going to come from outside anyway, not from the right election result, not from a foreign government with good intentions, not from any agreement signed between people in suits who have never had to live with the consequences of their decisions, it was always going to have to come from us, from inside, imperfect and exhausted and still paying attention, which is not a comforting thought, but it might be the only honest one.
