NIGERIANS are tired of Nigeria. This is not a radical statement anymore. It is what people say out loud now, on buses, in markets, at work places, on social media, with no shame and no apology. The exhaustion is real, and it has been building for a long time. What used to be a private feeling shared between close friends has become a national conversation, and the fact that nobody is embarrassed about it anymore tells you just how far things have gone.
Life in Nigeria today is something most people endure rather than enjoy. Food prices go up so often that people have stopped being shocked by them. A young person can finish university, find a job, show up every single day, and still not be able to pay rent and eat well in the same month. Parents sit at the tables doing maths that should never have to be done, deciding whether this month’s money goes to school fees or feeding. That kind of pressure, carried week after week and year after year, wears people down in ways that statistics cannot fully capture.
Young people were told that education was the way forward. Many of them believed it and worked hard for it. Then they graduated and found that the doors they were promised were either locked or did not exist at all. The ones who do find work often find jobs that pay too little, offer no stability, and lead nowhere. After enough years of that, ambition starts to feel like a joke. People stop thinking about what they want to build and start thinking only about how to survive the month.
Then there is the matter of safety, and this is where the story becomes not just sad but deeply troubling.
People are afraid in this country in a way that has become completely normalised, and that normalisation is perhaps the most dangerous thing of all. Farmers cannot always go to their own fields because armed men may be waiting. Parents hold their breath every time a family member travels a long distance.
Commuters on certain roads have learned to mentally prepare themselves for the possibility of being stopped at gunpoint. Children have been taken from school dormitories in the middle of the night while their parents slept, trusting that the government would keep them safe. That trust has been broken too many times to count.
The rate of kidnapping in Nigeria has reached a point that should be causing a national emergency response. Bandits and criminal gangs operate across large parts of the north, the south-east, and the middle belt with a boldness that suggests they are not afraid of being caught. Entire communities have been held to ransom. Travellers on major highways have been ambushed, taken into forests, and held for weeks while their families scraped together money they did not have. Some victims are released. Others are not. And the cycle continues almost without interruption.
What makes this even harder to accept is what happens when you set it against the government’s record of finding people it actually wants to find. When a Nigerian goes on social media and makes a post that is considered offensive to a powerful person or critical of those in authority, the response can be remarkably swift.
Security agencies have shown, on more occasions than can be dismissed as coincidence, that they are capable of tracing a person’s location, identifying who they are, travelling to wherever they live, and arresting them, sometimes within hours of the post going up. They have done this in Lagos, in Abuja, in Port Harcourt, in small towns that are barely on the map. The technology works. The coordination works. The will is clearly there.
But let a family report that their father was taken by kidnappers on a road that everyone knows is dangerous, and suddenly the machinery of government moves as though it is wading through concrete. Investigations stall. Rescue operations either do not happen or happen too late. Families are sometimes quietly advised to negotiate with the kidnappers themselves because the official channels offer so little hope. The police, who can locate a man in Kano because he tweeted something that angered a politician, seem unable to locate armed gangs that have been operating in the same forests and hills for years.
This contradiction is not a small thing. It speaks directly to what the state considers worth protecting. When a citizen’s personal safety matters less to the government than a politician’s reputation, something has gone very wrong with the priorities of that government. People notice this. They talk about it. And it feeds a sense of abandonment that is at the root of why so many Nigerians have decided that this country is no longer the place where they want to build their lives.
The internet is full of stories of Nigerians who were arrested and detained for social media posts that criticised government policies or made jokes about public figures. Some were held for days without formal charges. Some had their phones and laptops seized. Some lost their jobs because of the publicity around their arrests. In almost every case, the speed at which the security apparatus moved was impressive in a grim kind of way. These were not hardened criminals who had been under surveillance for months. These were ordinary people sitting at home with their phones, and yet they were found and picked up faster than most kidnapping victims are ever rescued.
Meanwhile, the kidnappers continue. They negotiate ransoms through middlemen. They release videos of their captives. They move between states. They cross into different regions. And in most cases, they are never brought to justice. When arrests are made, they are often presented at press conferences with great fanfare, but the operations do not stop. New victims are taken. New families are broken. The business of abduction, in many parts of Nigeria, has become so routine that it barely interrupts the news cycle anymore.
The financial damage this causes to ordinary Nigerians is immense but rarely talked about. Families have sold land, borrowed money from every person they know, and gone into debt that will take years to pay off, all to secure the release of a loved one. Some do not have enough and must watch the days go by not knowing if the person they love is still alive. The emotional cost of that kind of helplessness is not measurable, but it is real, and it lives inside families long after the person has been returned or lost.
Beyond the human suffering, insecurity has quietly strangled the economy in ways that are hard to reverse. Farmers who are afraid to go to their fields produce less food. Less food means higher prices in the markets. Small business owners who travel for goods now pay unofficial levies to bandits on certain roads, and that cost gets passed on to customers. Investors, both local and foreign, look at the security situation and decide their money is safer somewhere else. The government celebrates the ones who come in spite of this, but it rarely acknowledges how many more never come because of it.
The cost of living continues to punish people who are already struggling. The electricity situation has not improved in any meaningful way for the average household. Businesses still run on generators. Hospitals still depend on backup power. Students in university hostels still find ways to charge their phones and study in the dark. These are problems that have existed for so long that younger Nigerians have never known anything different, and that is perhaps the most heartbreaking part of all.
Many people have also come to believe that merit simply does not matter here. If who you know opens more doors than what you can do, then investing in your own skills starts to feel pointless. This is not laziness. This is people responding logically to the environment they are in. When the environment rewards connections over competence, the people with the most ability tend to be the most frustrated, and the most frustrated are the most likely to leave.
The word japa has become part of everyday speech. It means to escape, to go, to get out. It used to be said with a nervous laugh. Now it is said with quiet determination. And the people leaving are not only the young ones chasing adventure abroad. They are doctors who are tired of working in hospitals with no supplies. They are engineers who are tired of watching infrastructure fall apart while being told there is no budget to fix it. They are teachers who are tired of going months without salary. They are parents who have decided that their children deserve to grow up somewhere they can walk to school without fear.
None of what would fix this country is a mystery. Protect people from the criminals who prey on them with the same energy that is currently used to protect the powerful from criticism. Create jobs that pay a living wage. Bring down the cost of food and basic goods. Keep schools open and stable. Put working equipment in hospitals. Fix the roads. Make sure that public money ends up as public good rather than private wealth. These are not unreasonable demands. They are the basic expectations that citizens in many other countries have of their governments, and those governments meet them without expecting to be celebrated for it.
Nigerians are not asking for perfection. They are asking for a country that takes their lives seriously. They are asking for a government that treats a kidnapped father with the same urgency it treats an embarrassing tweet. They are asking for leaders who understand that a nation’s reputation is not built by silencing critics but by building a place where ordinary people feel safe and valued.
The frustration that is everywhere in Nigeria right now is not the sound of a people giving up. It is the sound of people who still care deeply about this country but are getting very close to the end of their patience. If those in power are paying any attention at all, they will understand that this moment calls for action, not speeches. If they are not paying attention, the people who are most capable, most hardworking, and most fed up will keep leaving. And a country that loses its best people, year after year, to places that treat them with basic dignity, will one day find itself wondering why nobody stayed to build it.
- West is a seasoned journalist and development practitioner with over a decade of experience in media, human rights advocacy, and NGO leadership. Her syndicated column, The Wednesday Lens, is published every Wednesday in News Point Nigeria newspaper. She can be reached at bomawest111@gmail.com.