Karamba(ni)!

Karamba! The Spanish yelp of surprise, the startled gasp when life throws a curveball. Karambani—the Hausa spirit of impulsive, childish meddlesomeness, that stubborn refusal to sit still, consequences be damned, strategy optional. Fuse them with a cheeky “ni” and you get Karamba(ni)!—a cry that perfectly captures our national dilemma: we spot the mess, exclaim “Karamba!” […]

Karamba! The Spanish yelp of surprise, the startled gasp when life throws a curveball. Karambani—the Hausa spirit of impulsive, childish meddlesomeness, that stubborn refusal to sit still, consequences be damned, strategy optional. Fuse them with a cheeky “ni” and you get Karamba(ni)!—a cry that perfectly captures our national dilemma: we spot the mess, exclaim “Karamba!” in shock, then default to the childish tantrum of surrender or flight instead of the bold, bratty persistence needed to fix it.

Karamba(ni)! We see the potholes swallowing cars like angry hippos, the hospitals where patients arrive with hope and leave with bills or burials, the schools churning out certificates instead of thinkers. Karamba! we shout. Then comes the karambani: the impulsive shrug, the mature decision to japa, the wise counsel that “this country cannot be fixed.” Not in our lifetime. Maybe not even if Jesus Christ tried—echoing a sobering quip once attributed to no less a figure than Olusegun Obasanjo, arguably one of our more consequential leaders.

This rhythm beats through our national life like a defective generator: shock, impulsive surrender, repeat. We admit the predicament is unacceptable—corruption that makes colonial extraction look like child’s play, infrastructure that mocks the word “developing,” institutions hollowed out by ten-percenters who learned their trade too well from the departing masters. Colonialism never taught us democracy; it taught efficient bone-picking for the exchequer. When the Union Jack came down, the exchequer simply relocated to private pockets. We noticed. Karamba!

Yet the deeper, more jarring problem is not the admission or even the will. Plenty of leaders and followers, including the immediate past president who rode in on a wave of determination, have simulated the outrage. Yes, he even shed tears in public.

The real intellectual crisis—the one more consequential—is the poverty of “how.” The failure of imagination. The reflexive copy-and-paste from Western templates that buckle the moment our own context bites. Herein lies the rot at the center of our national psyche: we lack imagination. We refuse to critically challenge our cognition. We have no original solutions whatsoever. Our entire model of problem-solving is to look at what the West did, copy their homework, and hope for the same grade. But what happens when the problem is uniquely Nigerian? What happens when the colonial hangover meets the modern globalised chaos and produces a monster no textbook in Harvard or our own ABU ever anticipated? We falter. We fail.

Karamba(ni)! Our best brains choose flight over fight. Japa becomes gospel. They pack their impressive CVs and argue with straight faces that staying is childish irresponsibility. That is aimless Karambani. Only a fool, they say, would ignore the structural foundations rotting since amalgamation. Better to be a respected stranger in someone else’s land than a deluded patriot at home.

This is where the metaphor bites with wit and then draws blood. The Spanish “Karamba!” is the honest exclamation of surprise at dysfunction. The Hausa “karambani” is the impulsive, presumptuous energy that refuses to accept “impossible” without at least poking it disrespectfully. Together, Karamba(ni)! mocks our habit of exclaiming at the problem then acting out the most defeatist impulse possible—surrender dressed as wisdom. Real karambani would be the bratty insistence on tinkering anyway, on crawling when the tank is empty, on imagination when the manual fades out.

China faced a century of humiliation far bloodier and more degrading than ours. They did not japa en masse. They drove until the gas was gone, walked until feet tore, crawled until they fed the soil—and filmed the comeback. Today that “hopeless case” is a phenomenon. They did not wait for perfect Western-style institutions; they applied stubborn, adaptive imagination to their realities. We, meanwhile, still debate imported governance models while our own context laughs at the mismatch. Colonial education taught extraction, not nation-building. We graduated with honors in that syllabus and wonder why the ten-percenters still rule the roost.

Karamba(ni)! Listen to the construction site. Workers haul blocks and sand upstairs like donkeys under the sun. My friend once pointed in outrage when I argued we are more a less a lazy bunch as a nation: “See hard work!” But muscle alone is donkey work.

And as Edison reminds us, success is 99 per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration—and that one per cent is the spark that turns sweat into dominion. Donkeys have never built civilizations. Brains pushing boundaries have. What we need is not more honest graduates or determined strongmen who discover midway that “it cannot be done.” We need thinkers swollen with imaginative agency, men and women possessed by a persistent, childish karambani that yells “Karamba!” at every setback but refuses to surrender the fight.

“Despair is the one sin that can never be forgiven”, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o echoed in spirit. Sin brought death; only its disappearance ends it. Yet we wear despair like a badge of sophisticated realism. “Nigeria is unfixable.” “Not in our lifetime.” These are not diagnoses; they are excuses that let the speaker feel noble about going AWOL.

Dan Mangan’s song “Road Regrets” has a line that should be tattooed on every Nigerian passport: “Escape can’t be the only way to escape.” Listen to the whole verse: “We drive until the gas is gone / And then walk until our feet are torn / Crawl until we feed the soil / Film the whole thing.”

The indictment is harshest on our definition of “best brains.” True excellence should make the impossible routine, like rocket science tackling problems no one has solved before. Instead, our brightest often excel at replication, not creation. This rhythm must break: exclamation of crisis, followed not by childish flight but by childish audacity. Imagine vibrant governance that grows from our own soil rather than imported rituals that feel like foreign costumes. Imagine infrastructure solutions that do not ape skylines but solve heat, dust, flooding, and population pressure on their own terms. Imagine education that produces creators, not certificate carriers waiting for foreign employers.

It will be hard. Of course it will. Hard like rocket science. But rocket science exists precisely because humans refused to accept that the sky is the limit. We need that same refusal—seasoned with karambani stubbornness and tempered by sobering realism, not defeatism.

Karamba(ni)! Make that our battle cry, not our surrender. Shock at the state of things, yes. Then the impulsive, almost irresponsible determination to meddle anyway, to tinker like curious children who haven’t yet learned the adult art of elegant despair. Let the best among us stop boasting about escaping and start boasting about refusing to.

Because in the end, escape can’t be the only way to escape. We drive until the gas is gone. We walk until our feet are torn. We crawl if we must. And then we stand, dust ourselves, and build—proudly, stubbornly, childishly—at home.

Karamba(ni)! The convergence is instructive: surprise without surrender, impulse channeled into persistent creation. Nigeria does not need more adults who have learned to despair wisely. It needs more “children” crazy enough to believe the donkey work of muscle must be led by the rocket science of imagination. The problems are foundational, yes. So must be our audacity.

Let the rhythm ascend with colorful defiance, then land with raw, mirthless urgency: we have no other home. The strangers’ lands will never love us like our own flawed soil can, once we stop grieving and start engineering. Despair is the real childish tantrum—the irresponsible one that damns consequences while pretending maturity.

Karamba(ni)! Time to grow up by staying young at heart. Time to fix what we all agree is broken, not by copying someone else’s homework, but by daring to write our own answers in the dust, sweat, and genius of this land.