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NIGERIA’S TROUBLING COLLECTIVE MENTALITY FAILURES
By: A G Abubakar

In the 1970s, it was fashionable to mount a spirited defence of sub-Saharan societies against any reference to governance failure, often dismissing such critiques as racist. Later, imperialism was added to the interpretive lens. Both explanations were seen as Western ploys to denigrate Africa, plunder its resources, and subjugate its people—a case of calling a dog a bad name in order to hang it. Half a century later, however, a rethink is unavoidable. While elements of those perceptions remain valid, African societies themselves have increasingly proven complicit in their developmental predicaments.

Nigerians, inclusive, appear to suffer either from inherent vulnerabilities of mentality or from historical experiences that have left indelible marks on the collective psyche. Both victim and perpetrator are therefore culpable. It is what the Hausa proverb captures succinctly: idan ɓera na da sata, daddawa ma na da wari—if the rat is accused of stealing, the locust-bean seasoning itself also emits a tempting smell.

The most damaging form of this complicity is a mentality that struggles to identify challenges, accept ownership, and act decisively. It is a mindset unable to internalise the truth that if you do not act for yourself, no one else will—not for you as an individual, not for you as a race, and not for you as a nation. The world owes no one relevance beyond statistics; only value confers identity.

Information and knowledge, it is often said, constitute that value and power. Whether secular or theological, societies that acquire and apply either tend to improve their well-being. They deploy them to overcome deprivation, ignorance, disease, and premature mortality. According to the UN, over the past half-century the world has reduced poverty, increased life expectancy, lowered illiteracy, and curbed major global conflicts.

Global extreme poverty—defined as living on $2.15 per day—fell from over 40 percent in 1986 to less than 10 percent by 2019. Global mortality rates have dropped by about 60 percent since 1950, while life expectancy rose by roughly 20 years by 2023. Adult literacy increased from 67 percent in 1976 to 86.36 percent in 2023. Major wars of a global nature have also declined since the Second World War in 1945; battle-related deaths, way back in the 90s has dropped to a third of the 1970s.

In Nigeria, these global gains remain largely illusory. Only last year, the country was described by the World Bank and IMF as the poverty capital of the world. Insurgency, terrorism, banditry, killer herdsmen, secessionist militias, and communal violence have turned life into a disposable commodity. Carnage has become routine, depressing life expectancy. The USA, has even accused Nigeria for doing little to stem the killings. With over 20 million children out of school, Nigeria’s literacy rate lags far behind the global average. Sadly, these grim indicators apply to much of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) —even in the 21st century.

Rather than interrogate the form, content, and application of the knowledge that they consume, these societies have embraced an evasive escape—attributing their failures to the Almighty. Nigerians, in particular, have adopted a cloaked mindset that renders them oblivious to their relative and worsening backwardness. Innovation, manufacturing, maintenance culture, and orderly systems are subconsciously assigned to “other people.”

This debility is often explained through historical grievances—slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and even Marx and Engel’s “historical dialectical materialism” —while ignoring the rigidity of mentality. A mindset that unites intellectuals and the uninformed alike under a banner of perpetual victimhood, forgetting that other societies endured comparable traumas and yet transcended them.

China suffered imperial domination by the Mongols between the 14th and 18th centuries or even before; Korea endured Japanese imperialism. Much of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia were victims of both domestic and international slavery before being colonised by European powers. Britain, Spain, Portugal, the Dutch, France, etc were in the forefront of the historically ignoble practices. The Jews experienced centuries of bondage in Egypt. Most have moved on since.

Some have voyaged into space and even gunning for the moon, while Nigerians—and much of sub-Saharan Africa—cannot safely access farms or village markets. The prospects of improvement grow dimmer as mindsets remain trapped in the search for scapegoats and divine intervention, instead of human agency.

In Nigeria, individuals routinely produce children beyond their capacity to care for, then lament behavioural problems and blame divine destiny. Evasion has become a lifestyle. A person beats traffic lights, gets knocked down, survives—and attributes it to divine ordination. Even death resulting from reckless behaviour is explained away as the will of God. Self-accountability is conspicuously absent. Waste is dumped into drains, waterways are blocked, floods and diseases follow—and prayers are offered for prevention. Government is blamed, even as perpetrators present themselves as victims. The irony is staggering.

Communities ignore early warning signs of insecurity until violence consumes them. Only then do leaders search for culprits and call for prayers. Denial precedes disaster; imagination flourishes afterward. Farmers fell trees indiscriminately, refuse sustainable practices, yet complain of poor yields and soil exhaustion—again blaming fate. Even, personal choices are made on impulse, devoid of vision or sustainable interests. The people, thus keep recycling politicians they love to curse for non performance, usually after appeals to premordial sentiments and gifting palliatives that could last few days. Thereafter, deprivations take over; as the politicians kept switching political camps in pursuit of material gains since democracy in Nigeria lacks ideological anchor.

The story is not different with the elite class. They can attend the best schools, excel academically, travel the world and get enlightened, speak queen’s English (blow big big grammar), but in the end hardly rise above the ordinary. The mindsets never change. Something akin to a well trained circus tiger, that remains what it is after a beautiful performance; a four-legged creature
The educated youth are not left of the mentality confusion too. Those searching for opportunities – jobs, businesses, spouses etc – cannot even link their constraints to such obvious factors as economic downturn and the need for a pragmatic way out. Instead, they resort to the metaphysical, by moving from one prayer house/cleric to another, making sacrifices and procuring anointing oil, white handkerchief and the likes for an elusive breakthrough .

Worse still, public functionaries in the sexagenerian bracket (60+) who steal public wealth to become emergency billionaires, knowing fully well that they have less than two decades of “active” life. Statistics has also shown that stollen wealth, unlike the institutional one, hardly thrives after well after the grandmaster thief. Yet Nigerians are helplessly trapped in this infamy.

Government mirrors this mentality, too. Infrastructure is built without maintenance culture. Industrialisation is preached while power generation is neglected. Saboteurs are blamed for predictable failures. When crises escalate, defence budgets balloon. Yet corruption drains resources, resulting in poor equipment, soldiers’ welfare and motivation; allowing violence to mutate and expand.

Existential threats then trigger national prayers. Mosques and churches mobilise. Phantom enemies are invented. The Almighty is summoned to fix self-inflicted chaos. Is this not strange?

Historical experiences matter, but something deeper is at work. Why this resistance to responsibility? Why the insistence that God should clean up messes deliberately created by humans endowed with reason? Why should the people resign themselves to being consumers of other people’s industrial outputs without questioning why they couldn’t do the same thing? Why feel mentally comfortable with it?

Nigeria and indeed the SSA must embark on sincere self-introspection. If education has failed, it must be reformed. If religion has been misapplied, lessons must be drawn from societies where faith, and culture coexists with progress.

The education system and intellectual class must reassess learning content. If mental colonisation persists, it must be dismantled, for a new and progressive mindsets to evolve. It is tragic for an entire people to reconcile themselves to permanent marginality. Certainly, not after dark peoples’ dark experiences in history right from the times of Noah, Egyptian Pharoahs, the slavery days, the colonial and neocolonial periods and down to the balkanisation of the continent.

Africa was partitioned at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and subjected to colonialism, followed by neocolonialism. Globalisation, the internet, and now artificial intelligence have completed a subtler chain of domination. The psychological impact has been profound—and escaping it may take generations. But this has to happen.

At some point, history stops sympathising and starts judging. No society can permanently outsource responsibility to slavery, colonialism, fate, or God without paying the price of irrelevance. Nations rise not because they pray harder, complain louder, or remember their wounds longer, but because they confront themselves honestly and act ruthlessly on that truth.

There comes a moment when a people’s suffering ceases to be tragic and becomes willful. God, having endowed humans with intellect, does not suspend causality for societies that locked their mindsets away. Nations that reject accountability do not collapse by conspiracy; they decay by choice. Nigeria’s crisis is therefore not metaphysical but moral—a rebellion against the discipline of cause and effect, and being obvious of it; consciously or otherwise.

Until this society accepts that progress is not a prayer point but a consequence of deliberate action, that faith without responsibility is superstition, and that victimhood is the most expensive ideology a nation can adopt, the future will remain a closed door—locked not by enemies, but from within. If Nigerian and indeed SSA societies have unique problems, which all nations have, they should accept it; work on it, and join the world in improving humanity.

If this obvious expectation sounds untenable then may be it is time to interrogate certain concepts that could help in understanding the people’s mindsets and how they may be influenced and shaped. Science has arguably tried to employ theories of epigenetics, niche construction, and cultural-historical model to shed light on the disposition of a people’s mindset. It would seem that while epigenetic factors shape predispositions of the mind, niche construction produces an environmental and institutional culture that discourages risk-taking and inquisitive inquiry, the two operating in a mutually reinforcing relationship.

Epigenetics, according to contemporary biological and behavioural science, refers to heritable changes in gene expression that do not alter DNA sequences but are influenced by sustained environmental pressures such as stress, deprivation, or social instability. Niche construction theory holds that humans actively modify their social and ecological environments, and these modified environments in turn reshape behavioural norms, incentives, and constraints across generations. The cultural-cognitive model further explains how shared beliefs, values, and learned heuristics become internalised as “common sense,” guiding perception, reasoning, and acceptable behaviour.

Taken together, these forces profoundly shape knowledge organisation, narrowing epistemic horizons, and entrenching cognitive biases that privilege conformity, risk-avoidance, and inherited assumptions over critical inquiry and innovation. Maybe it is time for a deeper introspection.
A.G.Abubakar agbarewa@gmail.com