Living in an unregulated environment: Nigerians and their state
“Money and garbage come together”, Japanese proverb During my 35 years in the Nigerian Foreign Service, I had the privilege of serving in countries where public life was organised around rules, standards, predictability, institutional efficiency and discipline. In Australia, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and the United States, I encountered societies that differed profoundly in culture, […]
“Money and garbage come together”, Japanese proverb
During my 35 years in the Nigerian Foreign Service, I had the privilege of serving in countries where public life was organised around rules, standards, predictability, institutional efficiency and discipline. In Australia, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and the United States, I encountered societies that differed profoundly in culture, history, political outlook and social habits, yet shared one important attribute: public order was not left to chance. Regulation was not regarded as oppression, but as the framework within which freedom, safety, enterprise and civic life could flourish.
I also visited many other countries where regulated and disciplined environments are the norm rather than the exception.
Roads are used according to rules. Cities expand according to plans. Buildings are constructed according to codes. Public utilities are maintained according to standards. Markets operate under oversight. Citizens know what is permitted and what is not, and public authorities are expected to act when standards are breached. It is from these personal experiences that I approach the subject of living in an unregulated environment in Nigeria.
One of the most troubling features of Nigerian life today is not merely poverty, insecurity, corruption, or institutional weakness, grave as these are. It is the deeper fact that millions of Nigerians increasingly live in an environment where the state appears present only in name, absent in function, and indifferent in consequence. The Nigerian state exists everywhere as authority, but too often nowhere as protection. It taxes, commands, arrests, summons, licenses, regulates selectively and punishes occasionally; but in the daily lives of citizens, it frequently fails to provide the basic order, predictability, fairness and discipline that make society liveable.
An unregulated environment is not freedom or liberty. It is not enterprise, nor the natural energy of a dynamic people. It is disorder masquerading as flexibility; survival without rules; commerce without standards; construction without planning; transport without discipline; markets without protection; urban growth without design; public conduct without accountability; and governance without consequences. It is an anything-goes environment in which the strong prey on the weak, the crafty on the innocent, the connected override the law, the reckless dominate public space, and the ordinary citizen is left to improvise life as best as he or she can.
This is the condition in which many Nigerians now live. The tragedy is that it has become so normal that we scarcely recognise its abnormality. We wake up each day into a society where noise, disorder, encroachment, extortion, garbage, unsafe buildings, bad roads, reckless driving, arbitrary pricing, counterfeit goods, polluted surroundings, blocked drainage, illegal structures and institutional indifference have become established facts of life. What should provoke outrage has become background noise. What should demand enforcement is treated as inevitable. What should be corrected by government is endured by citizens.
The unregulated environment is visible first in our cities. Nigerian urban life has become a daily encounter with chaos. Streets are built without sidewalks. Markets spill onto highways. Mechanics occupy public roads. Petrol stations emerge in unsuitable locations. Buildings rise without adequate approvals. Taxi drivers park wherever it suits them. Drainage systems are blocked by refuse. Electricity poles are broken, stolen, or left unattended. Entire neighbourhoods expand without planning. In many towns and cities, development appears to precede government rather than follow it. People build first and seek permits later. Public authorities arrive after the damage has been done, not to restore order, but often to collect fees, regularise violations, or look away. The ubiquitous sign on buildings, “Stop Work by Order,” has too often become another language for “come and settle with us.”
This failure of regulation has consequences beyond aesthetics. It affects health, safety, mobility, beauty, productivity, sanity and human dignity. A city that cannot regulate transport wastes the time and energy of its citizens. A government that cannot manage drainage exposes its people to floods and disease. A society that allows unsafe buildings places lives at risk. A market without standards punishes honest traders and rewards deception. A road without discipline becomes a theatre of daily danger. An economy without consumer protection becomes an arena where citizens are exploited by those who control supply, information, or access.
The Nigerian citizen has therefore become a permanent companion of disorder. He negotiates with transporters over arbitrary fares. He pleads with landlords over unreasonable rent. He ingratiates himself with officials over documents that should be issued by right. He smiles at policemen at checkpoints. He argues with electricity distribution companies over bills for power not supplied. He laments in hospitals over unavailable drugs, in schools over poor standards, haggles in markets over prices, negotiates with touts over access, with neighbours over noise, and with criminals over safety. Life becomes one long bargain with dysfunction.
The most painful aspect of this condition is that it compels citizens to become self-governing in the worst possible sense. Nigerians provide their own water, generate their own electricity, secure their own homes, repair their own roads, organise vigilantes, pay for private schools, patronise private hospitals, and create informal systems where public institutions have failed. This has sometimes been praised as resilience. But resilience, when stretched beyond reason and endurance, becomes abandonment. A people cannot be endlessly praised for surviving what they should never have been forced to endure.
The state cannot continue to celebrate the ingenuity of citizens while refusing to confront the conditions that make such ingenuity necessary. It is not a mark of national greatness that citizens buy generators because electricity fails. It is not evidence of enterprise that communities repair roads abandoned by government. It is not civic spirit when residents tax themselves for security because state security agencies are absent. These are symptoms of state retreat. They are signs that the social contract has unravelled dangerously.
Regulation is one of the most important functions of the modern state. It is not merely about control.
It is about the presence of the state and the protection of society from abuse, danger, exploitation and disorder. Regulation ensures that buildings do not collapse, food is safe, drugs are genuine, roads are passable, schools meet standards, water is available, hospitals are accountable, markets are fair, companies do not exploit consumers, and public spaces serve the public. Without regulation, society does not become freer; it becomes more dangerous, and anarchy prevails.
Nigeria’s problem is not that laws do not exist. In many cases, one may argue that we have too many laws and lawyers, judges and courts, agencies, boards, commissions, departments, task forces and enforcement bodies. The problem is that regulation is weak, selective, politicised, corrupt, or haphazard. Enforcement often comes as spectacle rather than system. A demolition exercise is carried out today with fanfare, only for fresh violations to begin tomorrow. A task force is set up with publicity, only to become another instrument of harassment.
A campaign is launched against fake products, but the networks that sustain them remain intact. A traffic law is announced, but enforcement depends on who is driving, whom he knows, or what he can pay. This selective enforcement is worse than no enforcement at all because it destroys public confidence. When citizens see that the poor are punished while the powerful are protected, they lose respect for the law. When illegal structures belonging to the weak are demolished while those owned by the influential are spared, regulation becomes oppression.
When traders are harassed but importers of substandard goods remain untouched, enforcement becomes nominal. When traffic offenders are punished only when they are ordinary citizens, law becomes a tool of class discipline rather than public order.
A regulated society requires impartiality. It requires that rules apply to all, not merely to those without connections. The Nigerian state must recover the moral authority to enforce order fairly, evenly and everywhere. This cannot be achieved through brutality or arbitrary action. It requires awareness, planning, consultation, notice, transparency, institutional capacity and consistency.
Citizens must know the rules in advance. They must see that government obeys its own rules. They must trust that enforcement is not arbitrary and not merely an opportunity for extortion. They must believe that regulation serves the public good, not official appetite.
At the heart of Nigeria’s regulatory crisis is the collapse of consequence. Too many people do wrong and get away with it. Contractors abandon projects and return for new ones. Public officials abuse office and are rewarded with higher appointments. Developers violate building codes and obtain retrospective approvals. Transporters endanger lives and continue operating. Schools fail standards and remain open. Hospitals commit negligence and escape scrutiny. Traders adulterate products and return to the market. Agencies fail in their mandates and still receive budgetary allocations.
In such a society, wrongdoing becomes rational because punishment is nominal.
The absence of consequence produces a culture of impunity, and impunity gradually becomes national character. Citizens begin to assume that rules are for fools. Those who obey the law appear naïve. Those who cut corners appear smart. Those who resist corruption appear impractical. Those who insist on standards are mocked as difficult. This is how societies decay from within, not by dramatic collapse alone, but by the slow normalisation of indiscipline.
Yet Nigerians are not naturally disorderly people. The same Nigerians who obey traffic rules abroad, queue properly at foreign airports, comply with building regulations in other countries, and respect public systems elsewhere are often compelled at home to behave according to the environment around them. This proves that the problem is not cultural destiny. It is institutional failure. Human conduct responds to incentives, consequences, examples and systems. Where the system rewards order and punishes unruliness, people adjust. Where it rewards impunity and disobedience, people adapt.
This is why leadership matters profoundly. A state that wishes to regulate society must first regulate itself. Government cannot demand discipline from citizens while public officials behave recklessly. It cannot preach order while official convoys drive against traffic. It cannot condemn illegal structures while political patrons protect violators. It cannot ask citizens to pay taxes while public funds are diverted or wasted. It cannot demand compliance while its own agencies contradict one another. The state must become the first example of the order it seeks to impose.
The restoration of a regulated environment in Nigeria must begin with a new philosophy of governance. Regulation should not be seen as punishment, but as public protection and duty. Urban planning must be revived. Building control must be professionalised. Consumer protection must be strengthened. Transport systems must be reorganised. Environmental laws must be enforced. Public health standards must be monitored. Markets and abattoirs must be supervised. Digital services, financial platforms, electricity distribution, telecommunications, aviation, education, health, housing and food supply chains must all be subjected to credible oversight.
But regulation must also be humane. The poor should not be punished for the failures of planning. Informal traders, transport workers, artisans and small businesses should not be treated as enemies of the state. Many of them occupy illegal spaces because government failed to provide legal alternatives. Therefore, enforcement must be accompanied by relocation, formalisation, infrastructure, credit access, market design and social protection. Order must not become cruelty. Discipline must not become dispossession. Reform must not become another name for punishing the vulnerable while sparing the powerful.
Nigeria needs a state that is firm without being oppressive, just without being arbitrary, orderly without being insensitive, regulatory without being extortionate, and developmental without being predatory. The citizen must feel the state not only as tax collector, policeman, or demolition squad, but as planner, protector, guarantor and provider of the public good. To live in an unregulated environment is to live under permanent tension and uncertainty. It is never to know whether the road will be passable, the medicine genuine, the building safe, the food healthy, the school credible, the hospital accountable, the market fair, the police helpful, or the government responsive.
No nation can build prosperity on such shifting sands of behaviour. No economy can become productive when disorder is the operating system of daily life. No democracy can mature when citizens encounter the state mainly through frustration. The Nigerian state must therefore rediscover one of its most elementary duties: to make society livable. This is not an abstract responsibility. It is the foundation of citizenship. A state that cannot organise public life cannot command lasting loyalty. A government that cannot enforce order fairly cannot inspire confidence. A nation that normalises disorder invariably normalises decay and underdevelopment.
Nigeria does not lack energy, talent, honesty, ambition, or enterprise. What it lacks is a disciplined environment in which these qualities can flourish. The task before the state is not to suffocate society, but to civilise public life through fairness, standards, planning and consequence. Until that is done, Nigerians will continue to live not as citizens fully protected by a functioning republic, but as survivors in a vast unregulated space where every day is an improvisation, every right must be fought for, and every ordinary act of living is a struggle against disorder. In the end, Nigeria must be careful not to resemble the disorderly, apocalyptic world that the film “Mad Max” made so unforgettable.