We Laugh, We Adjust, We Die

Dysfunction made normal.

Nigeria just turned sixty-five and nobody clapped. Nobody danced, nobody sang, nobody cared. The public holiday came and went and most people didn’t even remember why they weren’t at work. Independence Day has become just another day off, another excuse for traffic to reduce by half, another background date on the calendar that nobody wants to touch. The government made their speeches, maybe cut a ribbon somewhere, and the rest of us went about our lives as if nothing happened.

The truth is people are tired. There’s resignation in the air, like smoke you can’t get rid of. Everywhere you turn, people have quietly given up. Nobody believes in this country anymore, and those who still shout “patriotism” look like clowns performing for free in a circus that already burnt down. To wave the Nigerian flag with pride right now is not a symbol of hope, it’s a sign that you’ve lost touch with reality. Being a patriotic citizen in Nigeria today is less about love for country and more about public stupidity. Everyone else has checked out.

There’s a strange sickness in this country. It’s not malaria or typhoid, although those too will happily drag you into their cycle. This one is worse. It’s the sickness of adjustment. We can live with anything. Light goes, no problem, we buy fuel. Fuel finishes, no wahala, we trek. Water stops running, we buy pure water. They ban bikes, we jump keke. They ban keke, we squeeze into buses. They raise the bus fare, we squeeze tighter. Everything that should be a collective outrage just turns into a new form of logistics.

Other countries protest. They riot. They refuse. They burn things down. Us? We simply adapt. If the government told us tomorrow that oxygen will be rationed, we would quietly learn how to breathe once every two minutes. It’s not strength, it’s not resilience, it’s resignation. We take pride in how fast we can bend without breaking, but we forget that bending is also a kind of breaking. Slowly, silently, invisibly.

Look at Independence Day again. There should have been outrage in the streets. Why are we celebrating freedom when our daily lives are caged? Why are we clapping for leaders who loot us blind? Instead we laughed, scrolled through memes, and turned the day into a joke. We no longer believe in this country, but we also don’t resist it. We just keep moving. We treat dysfunction like normal weather.

And it’s not only the government that has failed us. Even the people themselves are not taking life seriously. We are suffering every single day, and yet it feels like we don’t even value our own existence. Thousands of Christians are being killed in the north and even in the south, whole communities wiped out, and it barely makes the news. Entire families slaughtered, but our collective reaction is silence. But let one American personality die, and suddenly Nigerian social media is in full mourning. When Charlie Kirk died, the whole media space in Nigeria lit up with commentary, tributes, reposts. Thousands of Nigerians die quietly every year, but for a stranger abroad we gather candles. The churches too; they will post statements for America, but when their own members are massacred, they stay quiet. How do you explain that? What is wrong with this country that we cannot even cry properly for our own?

Sometimes it feels like Nigeria is allergic to dignity. We embarrass ourselves daily. Our priorities are upside down. Our leaders do not lead, our institutions do not function, and our people have accepted chaos as a way of life. Abroad, things that are basic are considered rights. Here, they are luxuries. Constant electricity is luxury. Clean water is luxury. Roads that don’t flood every rainy season are luxury. Functioning hospitals are luxury. A working police system is luxury. Abroad, you can call an ambulance and it comes. Here, you will die before they even pick the call. Everything here is upside down.

And still, we adapt. We make jokes about our suffering, we give God the glory for small scraps, we turn pain into memes. It’s funny, but it’s not funny. Because the more we laugh, the more they know they can keep killing us slowly.

The truth is Nigeria has only one true export, only one thing we’ve given the world without shame: our music. Afrobeats is the only functioning institution in this country. It’s the only thing that works on time. It’s the only thing that delivers results. Artists go on stage and do what presidents cannot do: unite us, make us proud, give us joy. But should music be the only thing we hold onto as evidence of our humanity? Should beats and melodies be our substitute for working hospitals, safe roads, functioning schools?

We laugh about “Nigerian resilience” as if it’s a gift. It is not a gift. It is a trap. We should not be proud that we can queue six hours for petrol without fighting. We should not celebrate the ability to keep living after salaries vanish, after entire generations are massacred, after kidnappers demand ransom, after children learn under broken ceilings. That is not strength. That is survival. That is trauma disguised as personality.

The government knows we will adapt. That’s why they keep pressing. They know we will adjust to anything. They can ban, increase, reduce, restrict, inflate, and we will sigh and say “it is well.” We are complicit in our own suffering because we refuse to stop bending.

When did resignation become our culture? When did we decide that Nigeria is an unchangeable sentence? Nobody even dreams of protest anymore. The dream now is to leave. To take our resilience, package it into a visa application, and fly. And who can blame anyone? It’s hard to fight for a country that has already given up on itself.

But adaptation cannot save us forever. There is a point where bending turns into collapse. Maybe we have already crossed it. Maybe our silence on Independence Day is proof that the collapse has already happened. A country that cannot celebrate its own birth is a country that has stopped breathing. And we are just learning how to live without oxygen.