Have you ever driven in Nigeria? Yes? No? Alright, for you guys that are drivers in or have driven in Nigeria, you can laugh as you read this next paragraph. Let me explain the marvel of driving in Nigeria, Lagos to be specific, by painting a picture of what the start to a normal day looks like. You wake up, your alarm is blaring, or, the religious institution close by has been kind enough to remind you what time it is, it's 6:30am. You are in a panic because you are an hour behind schedule, there's almost no way you get to work at 8:00am now. You jump out of the shower just as fast as you jump in, you put on as many clothes as you can get out of the door with, the rest will be worn in the office car park. You jump into the car and speed out onto the road, navigating pot holes on your street like a temple run expert (I know, I'm aging myself here a bit). Then you get on the main road, and from the corner of your eye, a sea of red lights, from car after car greets you; you know you're in for it. You are now in traffic on a two lane road, which has somehow become 3 and a half car lanes, the half for Okadas (motorbikes) and keke napeps (Vespas). Here, road markings are treated as more of a suggestion than a guide.
You're in a hurry, antsy, looking at the time, fearing that you will be very late to the office. You notice the lane next to you is moving faster than yours, so you trafficate (not a real word I know, just google it) and move slightly to indicate your intention to join the lane. The first car goes by, so does the second one; you're looking out to catch the eye of the next driver; hoping eye contact gets you a favour. The next driver ignores you completely. Thing is, now he's exactly next to you, the traffic has stopped; you keep looking in his direction, but he refuses to look at you, guilty conscience has set in. When the lane moves again, the same cycle continues, no one is willing to let you in, so you force your car ahead of someone who is just a second too late on the accelerator. This goes on and on; oh, and just to add, when someone from the lane you left behind wants to get ahead of you, you also don't let them in, in case you think you are the only angel on the road. Then you get to the spot of the traffic, and you see what you have been lucky to escape; a car accident.
A car trying to change lanes has collided with another trying to make sure that car doesn't get ahead, who is just a bit too late on the accelerator. They both stop in the middle of the road, arguing back and forth. There's no useful insurance, there are no tow trucks nearby; agberos (hoodlums) surround the car, everyone is yelling, no one listening. When you step back and look at it, 2 people have ruined the day of at least 10,000 people because both of them wanted to save a second or two. It is not just a feeling either. Research from the Danne Institute for Research, done in partnership with Financial Derivatives Company, found that Lagosians lose an average of 3 productive hours a day commuting to work, and that the city loses something close to N10.39 trillion in GDP every single year because of traffic congestion. Added hours to what should have been minutes; forcing people to explain to their bosses why they were late, children marked down in school because they were late, people late for appointments, potentially life changing appointments. Everyone ends up in a bad mood, cursing the people that caused the traffic. The bad mood in turn affects customers or stakeholders at their job. All of this, for the want to be ahead. Where are you rushing to?
This is Nigeria in a nutshell, a country with people from different backgrounds, who want to always be ahead; always want to have an advantage over their neighbours; a people who don't realise that coming together for a common goal would be a lot easier than fighting each other. If everyone in traffic just helped each other, one at a time, the traffic would clear. Isn't it ironic then that the major religions in Nigeria, a supposedly deeply religious country, preach helping your neighbour? But, that's a discussion for another day.
Divide and conquer wasn't just a slogan colonial administrators muttered to each other over gin; it was policy, written down and budgeted for. The British didn't invent Nigeria's ethnic and regional differences, but they built the entire colonial project around them. Under indirect rule, the system Lord Frederick Lugard tested in the north and later exported across British Africa, colonial officers governed through local chiefs, emirs, and "warrant chiefs" they appointed or simply invented where none existed. Each group was taxed separately, educated differently, and, crucially, kept competing separately for the same limited colonial resources, never given a reason to see the next group over as anything but a rival for what little was on offer. This wasn't unique to Nigeria; economists studying the long-term effects of this kind of engineered division across Africa have found that its effects weren't fleeting. Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon, tracing how communities disrupted generations ago behave today, found that the mistrust it produced shows up in measurable, present-day form, in how willing people are to trust neighbours, strangers, even members of their own family. The mistrust didn't stay in the history books. It moved into the culture, then into the home, then into the car next to you in traffic.
Historically, there are 2 acts among many others that pass across this point effectively. Act one: on the 1st of January 1914, Lord Frederick Lugard joined the Northern and Southern Protectorates into a single Nigeria, a decision driven less by any shared identity between the people in those regions than by the financial convenience of running one administration instead of two. Researchers who have studied the amalgamation are consistent on the point that no serious effort was made to build a shared identity to go with the shared border. People who could have been encouraged to understand each other's differences and combine their strengths were instead kept administratively separate, and left competing for the same finite pool of resources. Act two came after independence, when the pendulum swung the other way. In May 1966, General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, Nigeria's first military head of state, signed Decree No. 34, the Unification Decree, replacing the federal system Nigeria had run on since independence with a unitary one, and pulling power away from the regions and into the centre. It sounds like the opposite of divide and conquer, but it produced the same outcome from a different direction: instead of several regions competing for their own resources, now everyone was competing for control of the one, much bigger, prize at the centre. Fragment first, so no group can out-organise the others; then, once the fragmenting has done its work, concentrate the resources somewhere small enough that whoever controls it, controls everything. The benefits in each region shrank, the few in control maximised their gains, and millions of people were left to fight over what remained, against others who were also suffering from limited resources. Two different playbooks, fragmentation and centralisation, but the same lesson drilled into every generation since: don't count on the person next to you, get there first. That lesson is not just a history lesson; it's something that has seeped into daily life. It shapes behaviour in ways most people never trace back to their source, and it is sitting in the car next to you the next time the lane ahead narrows to one.
So, let's go back to the road from earlier. Everyone leaves their homes to get to work, dreading the traffic they are just about to face. They know the importance of getting to work on time, getting their child to school on time, but the one subconscious decision that they have made, or that has been made on their behalf, determines the way they treat everyone else on the road. In their mind, everyone on the road is a hindrance, a barrier, an inconvenience that you have to get ahead of, to achieve your goal of being on time. An enemy, not a friend. It doesn't matter that you tell them that research shows that when there is a bottleneck on the road where two lanes reduce to one, cars moving one after the other from each lane, what traffic engineers actually call a zipper merge, is the fastest way for all to get out of the traffic. Studies on the subject have found it can reduce backups by as much as 50 percent in areas where lanes are reduced (this youtube video explains it quite well).
This pattern repeats itself everywhere. You go to a shop or a market to purchase something, the queue is never straight. You go to the airport, chaos ensues. You go to a government agency, a bank, a school, nothing different. Everyone, everywhere, thinks everyone else is a hindrance, a physical block that prevents them from achieving their goals. Everyone, everywhere, thinks the same. So each person really believes they are much more clever than the next person by being, what we call, "sharp". Reminds me of one of Nigeria's most used motivational quotes….I should say, one of Nigeria's most used incomplete motivational quotes:
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"Great minds think alike……but fools seldom differ"
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