Improvising As A Nigerian Living in Nigeria
One of the most essential skills of being a Nigerian living in Nigeria is the ability to improvise. You need to be able to adapt quickly because things could change at any given moment without warning. It’s not a nice-to-have skill, it’s an essential skill. And in many ways, society grooms you for this. You don’t even need to go to an institution to acquire it, your day-to-day interactions with society will teach you all you need to know.
Society plays a key role in this dilemma
My brother was born left-handed and I always admired that about him and most left-handed people. Since the majority of people are righthanded, it’s always nice to see someone different. However, Nigeria is a country where social interactions are done with the right hand. If you are shaking someone, right hand. If you want to pass an item to someone, right hand. Using the left hand to do these things is seen as rude or a lack of respect. I don’t know the origin of this social norm but it’s accepted throughout the country, through the boundaries of cultural and religious beliefs. Clearly, it’s not going anywhere. So my brother was gradually urged to learn to use his right hand to be able to fit into society.
Maybe a social norm is not the best example to give, after all, it’s already deep-rooted into the people. So another example will suffice. The tertiary education system (federal universities in my experience) in Nigeria has many highlights/flaws that cannot be covered by a single article. However, it’s one of the training facilities for “schooling” (pun intended) young people into the habit of improvisation. There are a number of examples of this but one that comes to mind is during the final year of school as students work on their final project. You may learn about the date of your project defence a day or 2 before the day and you are supposed to somehow be ready and available though you may not be in the state of your school. Even on the day of the defence, you may realize the slides you prepared won’t be used because the equipment for that is not available. You have to do your best to paint a vivid picture of your project to the examiners so that you’ll get a good score. It doesn’t stop there.
Computer labs either have limited laptops and computers or none at all. So you learn the theory. This extends to having practical exams like computer programming written on paper instead of on a laptop. Imagine writing and compiling code on paper.
Even when you manage to jump through all the hoops the system has to offer and still find a way to graduate, the labour market does not offer much salvation. There are few to no jobs available. If you manage to secure a job, the tools for the job are not always readily available so you improvise. If you don’t get a job, you improvise by starting a business and becoming an entrepreneur. You wake up one day and realize that every one around you is an entrepreneur. Some out of choice but many as a result of necessity. The alternative is to take your university degree to apply for odd jobs.
You provide your own power (through generator or inverter) because the power supply is limited and often unstable. You dig boreholes in your homes because that’s the only way you’ll get water supply. Communities come together to repair roads because the responsible authorities are not always forthcoming. Basically, you become a local government all by yourself. But how sustainable is this? Can we continue to improvise our way out of our reality?
Improvising can only take you so far…
In the tech world, one of the buzzwords always flying around is innovation. Around the world, people are creating innovative solutions to problems they find around them. This is great but there’s only so much you can do without every stakeholder carrying out their responsibilities. Many Nigerians have turned to tech to create solutions. They spend time and money building innovative solutions and suddenly get hit with unfavourable policies. From the okada ban in Lagos to the ban on crypto trading to the Twitter ban, there’s not much encouragement to “innovate.”
During radio conversations, I hear phrases like “let’s leave the government out of this”, “what can we do without the government?” How do you leave a major stakeholder OUT of these conversations? I don’t understand. There’s more than enough evidence to show that this won’t work. All it takes is one bad policy and your so-called innovative solution is dead. Like it or not, the government MUST be part of these conversations. For any relationship to work, all parties involved must be working together. Whether it’s between individuals, businesses or a government and its people. There’s no amount of improvisation that can be done to substitute for that collaboration.
