📰 The Public Square with Umar Aliyu
Title: The Nigeria We Must Not Get Used To.
There is a dangerous sickness creeping into our national soul the sickness of adjusting to failure. It happens slowly, without fanfare. At first, we complain loudly when the power goes out. After years of disappointment, we simply reach for the generator switch. The first time a pothole swallows half a car, we call the radio station to protest. Years later, the same road is worse, but now we drive around it like it’s part of the landscape.
When hospitals run out of drugs, we improvise. When schools lack teachers, we send our children to private classes. When leaders underperform, we lower our expectations and tell ourselves, “At least he’s better than the last one.”
This is how nations decline not in one dramatic collapse, but in small, daily surrenders to mediocrity.
Nigerians are among the most resilient people on Earth. We have learned to adapt to every form of hardship, inflation, insecurity, corruption, broken infrastructure and still find a way to smile. But resilience, when misused, becomes a trap.
Our ability to “manage” is being weaponized against us. Those in power know we will adjust. They know we will patch our own roads, pay for our own security, and fund our own communities. They know that our anger burns bright but briefly, and that by next week, the trending outrage will be replaced by the next scandal.
The primary duty of leadership is not to manage people’s suffering it is to remove the causes of it. Governance should be an organized system that allows citizens to thrive without having to fight for the basics. A government that does not provide this has failed its fundamental test, no matter how many speeches, statistics, or ribbon-cutting ceremonies it offers.
Politics should not be a game of who outsmarts whom. It is not a family inheritance. It is a sacred contract between leaders and the led. In a functioning democracy, power flows upward from the people, not downward from political godfathers. Yet in our current reality, many leaders behave as though we exist at their mercy.
We cannot afford to get used to bad governance, because what we accept today will be the standard tomorrow. Silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality it is consent. And when enough people consent, injustice becomes the law of the land.
Our refusal must be practical. It means asking questions at town halls, demanding detailed explanations for budgets, following up on promises, and voting with memory not just emotion. It means not celebrating leaders for doing the bare minimum. We must stop treating duty as a favour and accountability as an insult.
The Public Square will be a space for truth-telling. It will ask hard questions without fear or favour. It will bring governance down from the high walls of political language into the lived reality of ordinary Nigerians.
Every week, we will dissect political choices, expose social injustices, and remind those in power that Nigeria belongs to the people, not a privileged club. This will not be a platform of endless complaints; it will be a forum for ideas, solutions, and the revival of hope.
We deserve a Nigeria where government hospitals are good enough for ministers, where children of the poor and rich sit in the same quality schools, where the law is not a tool for the strong but a shield for the weak. We deserve a Nigeria where leaders measure success not by how much they stay in power, but by how much they improve lives.
It is time to stop normalizing what should never be normal. It is time to remember that leadership is a loan from the people, not a gift to them.
The Nigeria we must not get used to is the Nigeria we must rise to change and in The Public Square, we will keep that conversation alive.
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