Nigeria runs an accidental university. Its flagship course is Complaints 101. No JAMB cut-off, 200,000 students per session, and a 100 per cent pass rate. Lecture halls are our WhatsApp groups, Twitter spaces, and beer parlours. We can diagnose fuel prices, bad roads, and failed leadership with surgical precision. We inherited this skill from colonial and military eras, when complaining was the only weapon of the powerless. But 60 years after independence, the world has moved from diagnosis to design. We are experts at describing darkness and apprentices at lighting candles. As the Hausas say, “A mouth that complains cannot build a house.”
If action were an elective, its lecture hall would echo in silence. A JAMB cut-off of 120 would still leave seats empty. The syllabus is simple but costly: register your business, clean your street, vote and stay to count, and fix what you break. Rwanda understood this after 1994. Monthly ‘Umuganda’ – community work – made Kigali Africa’s cleanest capital. In Nigeria, ‘environmental sanitation’ exists on paper while streets stay dirty. We celebrate ‘hustle culture’ online but wait offline for Aso Rock to create jobs. Every Lagos skyscraper started with one bricklayer. Yet we fear action because failed promises taught us helplessness, and we wrongly believe big change must only come from the top.
The most accredited course is selfishness. Certificate: ‘Me and mine first’. Graduates sit in government, boardrooms, and even churches. It grew from the 1970s oil boom when ‘national cake’ replaced ‘community farm’. We stopped farming, stopped paying taxes, and started waiting for allocation. Today, DNA shows that when contractors use substandard materials, students buy exam runs, and landlords hike rent by 100 per cent in hardship. The Igbo proverb warns, “He who fetches firewood infested with ants invites lizards to his house.” Selfishness is not private. One man cutting corners on a bridge creates public debt for 10,000 commuters.
The hidden curriculum reinforces this: media rewards ‘roast culture’ over solutions; schools teach WAEC, but not civic duty, and the loudest complainer gets the TV invite, not the engineer fixing the borehole.
The truth is bitter. A skyscraper cannot stand on sand. Complaints bloat us; inaction starves us, selfishness anchors us. Singapore was poorer than Nigeria in 1965. Today, its GDP per capita is 20x ours because citizens chose discipline over comfort. Speed is solo. Endurance is collective.
New syllabus for Nigeria: Drop complaints 101. Enrol in Action 201. Burn the certificate of selfishness. Add ownership 301: If you use it, protect it. Until we stop holding seminars about Nigeria’s dream and start paying the price in our streets, the dream will remain a theory, not a reality.
The question for all of us: Which course will you delete from your personal curriculum this year?
- Olawale Akinnubi writes from Ogun State
