AmanaOnline

Why No Nigerian Is Truly Safe – including your tribe/region!

Many Nigerians mistake personal wealth for national progress. Private success is treated as an exit from public failure. High walls, armed escorts, generators, boreholes, private schools, and foreign hospitals become substitutes for functioning public institutions. Comfort is secured individually while the country collapses collectively.

During emergencies, Nigerians respond not with systems but with improvisation. Fires are fought with buckets and bare hands. Accident victims are dragged from wreckage by passersby with no training, no gloves, and no medical knowledge. Roads turn into scenes of confusion, prayers, shouting, and helpless crowds. Survival depends on chance rather than preparedness.

Public office holders and the elite operate within the same disorder. Public gatherings and official events are organised without emergency planning, medical teams, or evacuation protocols. When violence erupts, the injured are bundled into private vehicles or hoisted onto shoulders. Even proximity to power offers no shield from institutional absence.

This dysfunction has been normalised. Deaths are quickly attributed to fate. Tragedies trend briefly, then fade. Outrage dies down, and life moves on until the next incident. Repetition has numbed society into accepting conditions that should provoke sustained national outrage.

Calls for reform are often dismissed as complaints of the poor masses. Governance failure is treated as a distant inconvenience rather than a shared danger. Yet when disaster strikes, status dissolves instantly. Money, titles, and influence lose relevance in the face of systemic collapse.

Nigeria’s poverty is therefore not merely economic; it is structural. It is the poverty of institutions, preparedness, and collective responsibility. In moments of crisis, everyone arrives at the same destination—exposed, unprotected, and abandoned by the state.

There is no private escape from a public collapse. No fence is high enough, no convoy fast enough, no foreign passport quick enough when institutions fail at home. The belief that personal success can substitute for national progress is not only false—it is dangerous.

Nigeria’s greatest illusion is the idea that dysfunction only punishes the poor. In reality, it waits patiently for everyone. Emergencies do not recognize status, influence, or bank balances. They only expose what exists—or what does not.

Until Nigerians abandon the comfort of private solutions and demand functional public systems, this cycle will continue. Not as a threat, but as a certainty. Because a country without institutions does not discriminate in its failures.

In the end, collective neglect produces collective consequences. And in moments that matter most, the illusion of escape collapses, leaving everyone equally unprotected.

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By Engr. Hf Dauda MoiSoro

Writer | Public Affairs Commentator

Founder, AmanaOnline.com.ng