Spend enough time in almost any Nigerian city and it becomes difficult to sustain the argument that Nigerians are unproductive. Before sunrise, roads are already filling with people travelling considerable distances to work. Traders are opening shops, drivers are beginning another day on the road, artisans are preparing their tools, young people are working online for clients they may never meet, small businesses are finding ways around unreliable infrastructure, and professionals are often combining formal employment with one or two additional sources of income. Across the country, people expend enormous amounts of energy trying to create livelihoods, build businesses and improve their circumstances. The puzzle of Nigeria, therefore, is not why its people do so little. It is why so much human effort produces so little aggregate transformation.
This distinction matters because the way a problem is defined determines the solutions that follow. If Nigerians are assumed to lack enterprise, governments will create more entrepreneurship programmes. If young people are assumed to lack motivation, another empowerment scheme will be launched. If small businesses are thought to suffer mainly from inadequate knowledge, more training will be provided. Some of these interventions are useful, but they frequently address the individual while leaving the environment in which that individual must operate largely unchanged. We train the entrepreneur and send her back into an economy in which electricity is uncertain, logistics are expensive, access to finance is difficult, government processes are cumbersome and demand is constrained. When the business struggles, we are tempted to ask what else the entrepreneur needs to learn.
The deeper problem is one of conversion. Nigeria has considerable human energy, entrepreneurial capacity, technological adoption and commercial creativity. What it has struggled to build consistently are the institutions and systems capable of converting these assets into sustained productivity at scale. A productive society is not simply one in which people work hard. It is one in which an hour of work can produce increasing value because workers, firms and institutions operate within systems that enable them to become more capable over time.
Consider the small Nigerian business. Its owner may be simultaneously entrepreneur, accountant, customer-service representative, generator operator, procurement officer, debt collector and logistics coordinator. Considerable skill is required simply to keep such an enterprise operating. Yet much of that skill is directed towards overcoming problems that businesses elsewhere do not have to solve individually. A firm that must generate its own electricity, construct informal mechanisms for verifying customers, maintain several payment alternatives, organise its own security and constantly improvise around failing infrastructure is undoubtedly innovative. But there is an important difference between innovation that creates new value and improvisation that compensates for institutional weakness.
This distinction has occupied me in my research on technology, digital work and entrepreneurship in Nigeria. Again and again, I encounter people who use technology creatively to keep businesses operating under difficult circumstances. They develop workarounds. They combine digital and manual systems. They maintain several alternatives because no single system can be trusted completely. They improvise when infrastructure fails. These practices demonstrate resilience, but we should be careful about romanticising them. Resilience can become a very expensive way of running an economy.
A society should not require extraordinary resilience from its citizens simply to perform ordinary economic activities.
This is one reason Nigeria’s development conversation needs to move beyond the celebration of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is important, but entrepreneurs do not operate outside institutions. The most entrepreneurial population in the world would still struggle if businesses spend too much of their time and capital compensating for weak infrastructure and unpredictable systems. What determines national prosperity is not simply how many people start businesses, but how many of those businesses can become more productive, employ more people, accumulate capabilities, enter new markets and survive beyond their founders.
The same problem appears in discussions about young people. Nigeria is regularly told that its young population represents an enormous demographic opportunity. That is true only under particular conditions. A large young population does not automatically become a demographic dividend. It becomes an advantage when education, employment, infrastructure, technology and institutions allow young people to develop productive capabilities and apply them meaningfully. Without those conditions, demographic potential remains precisely that: potential.
Technology has made this contradiction even more visible. A young Nigerian in Lagos, Ibadan, Abuja, Enugu or Kano can increasingly participate in markets far beyond his or her immediate location. Digital platforms have created new routes into freelancing, retail, content production, financial services, software development and other forms of work. Nigerian entrepreneurs have shown an impressive ability to appropriate technologies for circumstances their designers may never have imagined. Yet technology does not remove the institutional environment surrounding economic activity. Digital workers still need reliable electricity, affordable connectivity, functioning payment systems, relevant skills, legal protection and access to wider economic opportunities. Technology can expand capability, but it cannot permanently compensate for every failure of the state.
This is why digital transformation should not be confused with putting government services online. A country does not become digitally transformed because it has launched more portals, created new databases or announced another technology programme. The more important question is whether technology changes the capacity of institutions to deliver. Does it reduce the time required to start and operate a business? Does it improve the ability of citizens to access public services? Does it make government decisions more transparent? Does it connect people to opportunities that were previously inaccessible? Does it allow institutions to coordinate information effectively? Does it make everyday economic activity easier?
The same principle applies to economic policy more broadly. Nigeria’s governments have historically devoted considerable political attention to the distribution of resources. Arguments about revenue allocation, political appointments, federal projects and access to the state are understandable in a diverse federation. But a country cannot distribute its way into prosperity. At some point, political competition must become increasingly concerned with the expansion of productive capacity: how much value the economy creates, how many capable firms it develops, how many productive jobs it generates, how effectively its institutions function and whether each generation acquires greater economic capability than the one before it.
This requires a different understanding of government. The state does not need to run every enterprise or determine every economic decision. It does, however, have a responsibility to construct the conditions within which people can become productive. Reliable infrastructure matters. Good education matters. Predictable regulation matters. Efficient institutions matter. Digital identity matters. Public safety matters. Trust matters. So does the often less glamorous work of ensuring that government agencies can implement the policies announced by political leaders.
Nigeria has produced many ambitious policies. The more difficult challenge has frequently been implementation. Announcing a programme can happen in a day. Building an institution capable of delivering consistently across years is considerably harder. It requires professional capability, administrative continuity, coordination, measurement and a willingness to learn from failure. These are less visible than political declarations, but they are the foundations upon which transformation is built.
The question confronting Nigeria is therefore not whether Nigerians are willing to work. Millions already work extraordinarily hard. Nor is the question whether the country possesses entrepreneurial people. The evidence surrounds us. The more consequential question is whether Nigeria can build a political and institutional system that multiplies rather than consumes the productive energy of its people.
That requires a shift in national ambition. We should judge development not simply by the number of programmes launched, businesses registered, technologies adopted or billions allocated. We should ask whether the ordinary Nigerian is becoming more capable of producing value with less friction. We should ask whether firms can grow without having to recreate basic infrastructure for themselves. We should ask whether young people can translate education into capability and capability into meaningful work. We should ask whether technology is strengthening institutions rather than merely digitising existing inefficiencies.
Nigeria already possesses much of the human energy required for transformation. The task ahead is to build a country capable of converting that energy into prosperity.
That is the challenge of building a productive republic.
