Why Relentless Policy Failures and Widespread Hardship No Longer Produce Outrage in Nigeria
By Nnaoke Ufere, PhD*
Why do the majority of Nigerians not feel political, economic, or social pain or outrage despite President Tinubu’s policy fiascos, broken promises, and relentless lies about a better tomorrow that has never come and shows no sign of coming?
It is a troubling question because pain surrounds us in Nigeria every day, in every place, and at almost every moment. For millions of impoverished families, from Aba to Zaria, it follows life from cradle to grave.
We feel it in the price of food that rises faster than our incomes, that is if we have an income at all. We feel it in rent that climbs beyond the reach of ordinary families and in school fees that force parents to choose which child can stay in class. We feel it in hospitals without doctors, equipment and medicines, in roads that collapse year after year, in our young people who graduate into unemployment, and in our households where poverty and hunger have become a daily reality. Across the country, families bury loved ones taken by insecurity, hunger, neglect, and conditions that should never have been allowed to exist.
By any reasonable measure, Nigerians are living through miserable conditions that should provoke sustained national outrage.
Yet the reaction is often brief, if any. Anger flares for a moment in social gatherings and beer joints. Talking heads scream at each other on Arise TV and Channels TV. Social media erupts with rants behind screens. A protest group of a handful of people appears outside gated office buildings or along empty streets. Meanwhile, co-opted pastors and imams speak from both sides of their mouth, assuring some of their gullible worshippers that tomorrow will be better even as the signs all point to a tomorrow that will likely be worse.
Then the noise fades and life goes on as if everything were normal. The political system continues unchanged. The same politicians remain in power, and the same hardship drags on year after brutal year until another billion dollars is reported stolen. Another kidnapping or killing occurs in a school or a place of worship. Another policy failure adds more pain to the lives of millions already living in poverty. And the cycle begins again.
I have watched this pattern play out again and again. It forces a difficult question. Do Nigerians truly see what is happening to them? And if they see it, why does it not provoke a deeper response? Pain is supposed to trigger resistance. It is supposed to push people to demand change. When pain no longer produces outrage, something deeper has happened to the Nigerian mind. Without outrage there will be no pressure for reform. Without reform, the conditions that produce the pain and suffering will remain in place.
In this article, I examine why this sense of public numbness has taken hold, how years of crisis and disappointment have weakened our collective and individual instinct to resist, what it will take for Nigerians to recover the will to confront the conditions that continue to harm us, and what lessons we can learn from the Aba Women’s Riot of 1929, when thousands of women rose up against colonial taxation and forced the authorities to respond to their demands.
Our Numbed Minds and Pain Tolerance
The explanation runs deeper than politics, tribe or religion. Over time, something has happened to the way we respond to pain and suffering. It is deeply psychological.
Human beings adapt to repeated pain. Studies of soldiers in battle revealed an unexpected pattern. The psychologist Ronald Melzack, whose work on the Gate Control Theory of Pain reshaped the study of pain, showed that pain is not just a physical signal from the body. It is an experience the brain interprets.
The brain helps regulate how strongly pain is felt. When painful experiences occur again and again, the nervous system adjusts so the person can keep functioning instead of shutting down.
The same process is already happening in Nigeria, a battlefield of sorts, where people face repeated exposure to corruption, violence, economic hardship, and political failure until what once felt shocking begins to seem normal. Over time, the mind dulls its response, not because the suffering has disappeared, but because constant exposure forces people to find ways to live with it. Psychologists call this habituation.
In Nigeria, many conditions that would provoke sustained national crisis elsewhere have become routine. Corruption scandals involving billions of dollars surface, dominate headlines briefly, and then vanish without consequences. Contracts worth billions of dollars are awarded and then abandoned half completed after funds have been siphoned off into private accounts. Elections are rigged with familiar regularity. The same recycled and corrupt politicians “win” elections every cycle. Police brutality and extortion continue despite repeated public outcry. Kidnappings and attacks spread across highways, farms, and communities.
Years of bad leadership, broken promises, and steadily lowered expectations from those who govern us have increased our tolerance for pain. The conditions that cause the suffering remain unchanged, and the politicians responsible for it remain in office, yet we have been conditioned to accept our plight and endure it in silence.
Late President Buhari devastated the country, and we endured it quietly. President Tinubu has performed worse, inflicting deepening hardship and hunger, and still our response is muted. What once shocked us now produces resignation and apathy. We now live with conditions that should have been rejected long ago.
As a result, we have developed a remarkable tolerance for conditions that would be politically explosive in many countries. Double digit inflation becomes a routine headline. Youth unemployment spreads across an entire generation. Electricity shortages persist decade after decade. Politicians accused of looting public funds live in opulence and remain influential and powerful. We even sing their praises and bow before them.
Psychologists also offer another concept that helps explain this collective pattern. In the late 1960s the psychologist Martin Seligman developed the theory of learned helplessness. His research showed that when individuals repeatedly face situations where their actions cannot change the outcome, they gradually stop trying to change those outcomes at all.
This idea has strong relevance for us in Nigeria, a country trapped in successive cycles of bad leadership and political failure. When elections keep returning the same recycled political class, when corruption investigations fade without consequences, and when leaders accused of looting public wealth continue to move freely through the corridors of power, we begin to assume that the system cannot be changed. Over time, resignation replaces the demand for accountability. We stop pressing our leaders to answer for their actions because experience tells us they rarely will.
This condition serves the political class well. A population that believes nothing will change becomes easier to govern with impunity and negligence.
Those in power understand this psychology better than we sometimes admit. President Tinubu sits at the top of a system that runs on this expectation. Senate President Godswill Akpabio and members of the National Assembly behave as if public anger is a temporary inconvenience. Ministers move through their offices with little fear of consequences. The Supreme Court hands down decisions that often settle political disputes in ways that leave citizens questioning whether justice or corruption prevailed. INEC conducts elections that many Nigerians no longer trust. Yet the system continues to function because those inside it know something about us.
They know we are politically impotent. They know outrage in Nigeria is predictable and short lived. Anger rises quickly and then fades. After every scandal, every policy failure, and every broken promise, the struggle for daily survival takes over again. When that happens, the pressure that might have forced real accountability disappears.
They also understand something else about Nigerians. They know we have developed a high tolerance for hardship and in our suffering, we bury our heads in the sand. So they act without fear of consequences.
Resilience is a Curse Word
They abuse us and then praise us for our “resilience.” President Tinubu has used this curse word, resilience, more than 200 times since taking office.
The word appears harmless, even flattering. But in practice it often functions as a quiet insult. When leaders praise the resilience of Nigerians, what they are really praising is our ability to endure the consequences of their failures.
Instead of fixing the problems that create the suffering, they celebrate our capacity to survive it. Fuel prices rise. Food becomes unaffordable. The naira collapses. Policies pile more hardship on people who already have too little. Yet the message from those in power is the same: Nigerians are resilient.
In other words, keep enduring the rising cost of living. Keep adjusting to failed policies and shrinking opportunities. Keep managing daily survival in a system that continues to make life harder.
Resilience becomes a convenient slogan that hides injustice. It shifts attention away from those responsible for the suffering and places admiration on those forced to survive it. A nation should not need endless resilience to survive its own government.
The Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake warned decades ago that when the state becomes an instrument for private accumulation rather than public service, citizens are pushed to the margins of political life. Politics becomes a struggle among elites for access to state resources while the population is left to endure the consequences.
That description still captures much of the Nigerian condition.Yet the story does not have to end in numbness.
The same human mind that adapts to pain is also capable of rejecting it. Habituation can dull reaction, but it does not erase agency. People are not laboratory subjects. Societies are capable of waking up.
We Must Free Our Minds and Break the Cycle
Breaking the cycle begins with a change in how we see ourselves.
The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire argued that oppressed societies remain trapped when people internalize the structures that dominate them. Liberation begins when people recover their critical consciousness and recognize that the systems governing their lives are neither natural nor permanent.
We must reject the idea that suffering is simply our national condition. Hardship is not a cultural trait. Nor is corruption our destiny. Misgovernance is not a permanent feature of Nigerian life. These conditions exist because systems and incentives allow them to exist. We allow them to exist and torment us.
We must also reject the quiet praise of resilience when it is used to excuse failure. Endurance is not a substitute for justice and good public service. Surviving dysfunction is not the same as accepting it. We must therefore cancel the implanted notion that resilience under oppressive hardship is a virtue.
We will break this psychological conditioning when we refuse to normalize what should never have been normal in the first place. That refusal appears when we demand accountability that does not disappear once tribe, religion, region, and poverty are used to divide us. It appears when voters punish failure instead of rewarding patronage, tribe, or religion. It appears when our communities organize, when young people reject the politics of apathy, and when public anger becomes sustained pressure rather than a brief moment of outrage on social media.
Nigeria does not lack intelligence, energy, or talent. What has been dulled by decades of dysfunction is our sense of collective power and agency.
To recover that power is to recover something deeper than political influence. It is to recover our sense of dignity and humanity.
When we refuse to remain numb, we begin to feel real pain again. And once we begin to feel the full weight of our condition as Nigerians, endurance alone will no longer be enough.
History reminds us that people can act when suffering reaches a breaking point. In 1929, thousands of women across southeastern Nigeria organized, protested, and confronted colonial authorities during the Aba Women’s Riot. They were ordinary market women and farmers, yet they forced the colonial administration to retreat from policies that threatened their livelihoods. Their strength came from collective action and a shared refusal to accept injustice as normal.
That same spirit must guide us now. The demand for change must stop being a brief moment of anger. It must become a constant expectation, expressed in how we act, organize, and vote in 2027. Our only mandate is to remove our tormentors from office, all of them. We can do it if we free ourselves from mental conditioning and learned helplessness, and if we stand together, united by our shared experience of hunger, poverty, insecurity, inequality, and horrendous suffering.
*About the Author
Nnaoke Ufere is a leading voice in African public thought and policy. He writes a weekly opinion column for the African Mind Journal, where his work shapes national conversations on leadership, governance, and reform. He is the author of Covenant With Nigerians: Reversing Our Country’s Decline. Nnaoke graduated from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka with a first class honors degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering in 1981. A Harvard MBA alumnus and PhD holder in Strategic Management from Case Western Reserve University, Ufere is an influential author, public intellectual, and global development analyst whose insights on U.S.-Africa relations and institutional accountability continue to challenge the status quo and inspire change.
