What are Nigeria’s problems?

What are the three biggest problems that Nigeria faces? What is the single biggest problem of the country? Which are the most pressing problems that account for why Nigeria remains the way it is, as a country perpetually known for ‘potential’ for hardly ever for achievements? Simply put, which is the single biggest problem holding […]

What are the three biggest problems that Nigeria faces? What is the single biggest problem of the country? Which are the most pressing problems that account for why Nigeria remains the way it is, as a country perpetually known for ‘potential’ for hardly ever for achievements? Simply put, which is the single biggest problem holding Nigeria back from realising its potential?

The question itself is important because analyses of why Nigeria has simply refused to get better has often been turned into arguments about balkanising the country altogether, as if that by itself would solve the problem. In other words, many of the solutions devised for moving the country forward have been based on emotional appeal or outrage and lamentation, rather than sober analysis. Yet, it is just possible that the solutions have not worked mainly because the problems themselves have been misdiagnosed. 

Moreover, the question is that most Nigerian adults will answer these questions differently, so it will be difficult to determine which answers are most frequently mentioned. Happily, however, there is existing data on their answers. Since 2017, the National Bureau of Statistics, in collaboration with the United Nations Office, have been conducting what they call Corruption in Nigeria Survey. So far, two editions of the survey have been completed in 2017 and 2019.

The surveys are based on the responses of over 33,000 Nigerians aged 18 and above across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). While the survey is primarily about the prevalence of corruption in Nigeria, as manifested particularly in bribery, the data contain a section called “Perceptions of corruption and other concerns” which measures the perceptions of Nigerians on corruption relative to other “important problems” in the country.  

In both years, a total of 13 of those important problems of Nigeria were preidentified in the survey, including ethnic or communal conflict, political instability, religious conflict, crime and insecurity, drug abuse and drug trafficking, and environmental degradation. Others included are corruption, high cost of living, unemployment, education, housing, healthcare, and infrastructure. So, which of these do Nigerians think are the most important problems in the country?

In 2017, Nigerians regarded unemployment and high-cost of living as the two most pressing problems in the country. Corruption itself came third, which is slightly surprising given the amount of popular talk about corruption as the bane of Nigeria’s development. Also in 2017, crime and insecurity was regarded relatively lower on 6th, with just about 10 per cent of the 33,000 respondents who considered it as the most important problem in the country. Housing and education, two issues which would matter considerably to most households, were ranked 7th and 18th respectively. The other problems follow in descending order, with drug abuse and environmental degradation placing at the bottom of Nigeria’s problems.

In the 2019 data however, a few things changed. Unemployment retained its position as the issue Nigerians thought was the biggest problem in the country, whereas in 2017, 17 per cent of the 33,000-sample thought it was the main problem in the country. This number shot up to 20 per cent in 2019, indicating that Nigerians were becoming more worried about it. A second change regards crime and insecurity, which ranked sixth in 2017, but second in 2019, with over 16 per cent of the sample regarding it as the most important problem in the country. And perhaps a consequence of these changes, corruption as a problem in Nigeria fell further on the scale from third in 2017 to fifth in 2019, while issues such as healthcare and housing rose further up on the scale.

Now, as we await the third edition of the surveys before the end of the year, three issues emerge from the data available so far about which problems are the most pressing for Nigeria. The first is the disparity—indeed the gulf—between media coverage and popular perceptions of issues that are regarded as the most important. Anyone following Nigerian media keenly would think that issues like insecurity, political instability, religious conflict, ethnic and communal conflict, and corruption, are the most important problems in the country. But these surveys over four years running indicate that a majority of Nigerians don’t think so.

Unemployment, for example, is hardly a concrete issue in the media, and perhaps not even on social media. Yet, in two rounds of representative, and therefore, generalisable surveys, Nigerians regard it as the most pressing problem in the country. Similarly, issues like political stability, religious conflict, and ethnic conflicts do not rank high at all in the minds of most Nigerian adults. In both 2017 and 2019, less than three per cent of the survey respondents thought each of these was an important problem in Nigeria, indicating that much of the noise in the media that pitches one regional, religious or ethnic group against another is really neither here nor there among the majority of the citizenry.

But then again, survey results are often based not only on the questions asked in the questionnaire, but how they are asked. For example, if crime and insecurity were operationalised as ‘banditry, terrorism and herdsmen/farmers clashes’, perhaps many more Nigerians would think them more important than reported in the surveys over the two editions so far. Also, if political instability was presented in terms of ‘faulty constitution’ or ‘restructuring’, maybe, just maybe, many more of the respondents would regard them as more pressing issues in the country.

But perhaps most importantly, survey results are based not only on the questions asked or how they are asked but on the range of options available to respondents. In this sense, there are several other problems that could have been indicated in the surveys which were not. For me personally, the biggest problems with Nigeria are cultural, not economic or political. By this I mean the range of ideas and practices that shape how we behave as Nigerians individually and collectively, but also which shape the behaviour of our political and economic institutions that together keep Nigeria where it is today.

There are no surveys of these issues to my knowledge, but for the sake of argument, I would say that the three biggest problems in Nigeria are in no particular order: a lack of that sense of Nigerian-ness or rather the internecine warfare about what Nigeria actually is or should be, the inability to retain wealth across generations, and third, a lack of basic competence at work among all strata of Nigerians, from the leaders down to the roadside mechanic.

Over the coming weeks, I aim to explore each of these in-depth, but for now, we can say that a society in which some of the most important questions about what it is or should be are resolved, a society that can retain the wealth it generates over a long time, and a society in which most people possess basic competence in the things they do can make considerable progress towards development regardless of any other challenges it might have in relation to such things as corruption, insecurity, political or ethnic conflict, and so on. Indeed, if a society can just keep the wealth it generates over a long time, then there is a good chance that many of the things we call ‘problems’ in Nigeria will disappear, for, as we shall see from next week, the social skills for retaining wealth in society are by far superior to those required to solve other problems such as corruption, political instability, unemployment or insecurity.