1. The Premise: Progress Is an Organisational Achievement

Progress is often spoken about as if it were a question of resources, intelligence, or luck, as if a nation simply needs enough oil, enough graduates, or enough goodwill from history to rise. This is a comforting but mistaken view. At its core, progress is an organisational achievement. It is the accumulated result of millions of small, sustained acts of coordination: people agreeing to show up at the same time, to contribute toward a shared pot, to follow a shared rule even when no one is watching, and to keep doing so long after the excitement of starting has worn off.

A people does not need to be rich, brilliant, or even particularly virtuous to progress. It needs to be organisable: capable of forming durable structures that outlast the individuals who built them, and capable of trusting those structures enough to keep feeding them. Singapore was not endowed with natural resources; South Korea emerged from a war more devastating than most African colonies at independence. What both had, even amid scarcity, was a working capacity to organise: institutions that collected what they promised to collect, delivered what they promised to deliver, and persisted past the tenure of any one leader.

This article makes a simple, almost embarrassingly basic argument. A people cannot progress if they cannot first organise around basic things, a market, a road, a queue, a shared bill, because the more complex achievements of nationhood (a functioning bureaucracy, a stable currency, a trusted electoral system, an industrial policy executed over a decade) are not different in kind from those basic things. They are the same organisational muscle, used at a greater scale and over a longer time. If the muscle is weak at the scale of a street, it will not magically strengthen at the scale of a state or a federation. Using Nigeria as the case study, this article traces that organisational deficit from the level of the individual, through community associations, through local and state government, up to federal policy, and asks what it would take, realistically, to build the muscle back.

2. The Basic Things We Cannot Organise

It is tempting to believe that Nigerians struggle to organise around politics because politics is uniquely corrupting, or around national institutions because the federation is uniquely large and diverse. But the pattern shows up first, and most starkly, at the most basic level, in settings where the group is small, the interest is shared, and the stakes are local and immediate. If organising fails here, the explanation cannot simply be “politics is dirty” or “the country is too big.” Something more fundamental is missing.

2.1 The Estate and Community Association

Across Nigerian cities, residents in private estates and neighbourhoods form Community Development Associations (CDAs) or Residents’ Associations precisely because government has failed to provide security, drainage, road maintenance, and waste collection. This is, in principle, an organisation working exactly as theory predicts: a gap in public provision is filled by voluntary collective action. In practice, these associations are themselves a recurring site of organisational breakdown.

Disputes over compulsory dues are now common enough to have produced a body of case law. In a landmark 2020 ruling, the Federal High Court in Lagos held that a company resident in the Gbagada Phase II estate could not be compelled to join the residents’ association or pay its dues, because membership of a voluntary association cannot be forced on anyone under Section 40 of the Constitution. This was true even though the dues were meant to fund the very security and sanitation services the company benefited from living there.

“The payment of estate or community dues, not being under tax nor likened to it, could not have any legal force unless residents become voluntary members or benevolently pay the dues.”

The deeper lesson is not the legal technicality, but what the dispute reveals: residents who clearly shared an interest in security, drainage, and street lighting could not agree, without resorting to litigation and coercive sanctions (impounding the cars of non-payers, blocking visitors), on how to fund the things they all wanted. Associations “resort to measures such as preventing residents who have not paid dues from leaving the estate with their cars or preventing the visitors of such residents from driving into the estates,” essentially privatised enforcement, because voluntary compliance could not be sustained on persuasion or shared interest alone.

This is organising around the most basic, least political thing imaginable: a few hundred neighbours wanting a safer, cleaner street. And it still required threats, blocked driveways, and court cases to function half-heartedly. If this is the result when the group is small, homogeneous in interest, and the benefit is immediate and visible, it should temper any expectation that organisation will simply appear when the stakes are more abstract, the group is larger, or the timeline is longer.

2.2 The Motor Park and the Road Transport Union

Few sectors illustrate organisational failure as vividly as road transport. The National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) exists, on paper, to organise commercial drivers: to regulate motor parks, set fair levies, and represent worker interests. It is one of the oldest organised labour structures in the country, with roots tracing back to 1932. Yet in practice, NURTW chapters across the country are widely associated with extortion through informal “agbero” (tout) levies that bear no relationship to any service rendered.

Researchers studying the union in Lagos found that drivers and passengers regard the dues collected by agberos as straightforward extortion rather than payment for any benefit, since the fees carry no corresponding right or promised service. One investigation found that the average driver in Lagos was paying as much as N3,000 a day in informal levies to touts before a 2022 attempt to harmonise the charge into a single N800 daily levy. Even after that reform, complaints of extortion persisted because the touts collecting the harmonised levy were still given aggressive daily targets.

The state has repeatedly tried to intervene and repeatedly failed to make it stick. Lagos suspended NURTW activities entirely in March 2022 amid a leadership crisis, only to reinstate it eighteen months later with little structural change. Edo State’s governor suspended NURTW and its sister body, the Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria, in 2025 over allegations the unions had become “economically disruptive.” In Oyo State, a court declared the state’s ban on NURTW unlawful in late 2025, while a workers’ rights group complained the state government simply refused to comply, leaving the union’s status contested between an executive that will not enforce its own ban and a judiciary it will not obey.

Here again, drivers share an obvious common interest: predictable levies, safe parks, fair dispute resolution. A union exists explicitly to organise around that interest. The result, sustained over nearly a century, has been captured by informal extraction networks that the state has tried and failed to dismantle through bans, court orders, and “harmonisation” schemes, each one eventually reabsorbed into the same pattern.

2.3 The Market Association and the Trader’s Levy

Nigerian open markets, Balogun in Lagos, Onitsha Main Market, Ariaria in Aba, are themselves the product of organisation: traders’ associations that allocate stalls, resolve disputes, and historically provided basic order long before government attention arrived. Yet these same markets are chronically vulnerable to fires that destroy years of inventory overnight, in large part because fire safety infrastructure, drainage, and orderly wiring (things the market associations are well placed to coordinate) are rarely sustained, even though every trader has an obvious stake in not losing their shop to a blaze that started three stalls away.

This is the same pattern as the estate and the motor park: a tightly bound group with an unambiguous shared interest, an existing associational structure built for exactly this purpose, and persistent failure to convert shared interest into sustained collective discipline.

3. If We Cannot Organise Around Interest, Why Expect Politics to Work?

This is the article’s central pivot. Political organisation, building and sustaining a party, a movement, or a voting bloc around a programme, is harder than organising around shared interest, not easier. Shared interest is the most favourable possible condition for collective action: everyone in the room benefits from the same outcome, the benefit is often visible and near-term, and the group is usually small enough that free-riding is noticeable. Politics, by contrast, asks people who disagree about ends, who may never meet each other, and who will not see results for years, to subordinate individual judgment to a common structure and to keep doing so when the structure asks for unpopular sacrifice.

If estate residents cannot sustain consensus on a security levy, if drivers cannot dislodge extractive touts from their own union, if traders cannot keep their own market safe from fire, it is not coherent to expect a population to spontaneously organise around something as abstract and contested as policy direction, ideology, or a multi-year reform agenda. These are categories where reasonable people disagree by design, and where the personal stake is diluted across millions of others making the same individual calculation that their one vote, one naira, or one hour of volunteering will not be the one that matters.

This is why so many Nigerian political movements follow an identical arc: explosive, genuine mobilisation around a single triggering grievance, followed by fragmentation once the question shifts from “what are we against” to “what exactly do we organise to build, and who is in charge of building it.” Section 6 examines this arc directly through the #EndSARS movement. The point to hold onto here is sequencing: organisational capacity is not summoned by the importance of the cause. It is built, slowly, in smaller and less glamorous arenas first, and where it does not exist, there it will not appear, fully formed, at the scale of national politics.

3.1 A Simple Hierarchy of Organisational Difficulty

The table below sets out, in rough order of increasing difficulty, the conditions that make organisation harder, and shows that Nigerian political organising sits near the most difficult end of nearly every dimension, while still failing at the easiest end (shared, local, material interest).

Table 1: Conditions of collective action, ordered by typical difficulty. Political organising combines nearly every difficult condition simultaneously.

4. From the People to the State: Why Expect Government to Organise What Citizens Cannot?

Government is not an entity separate from the society that produces it. Civil servants, council officials, ministry staff, and even the President were all, before their appointment, ordinary participants in the same estates, unions, markets, and families described above. No reservoir of organisational competence exists only inside government buildings and nowhere else in society. If a culture struggles to sustain the simplest forms of voluntary collective discipline, the people staffing its government will, on average, carry the same habits and same constraints into office, along with weaker accountability, since the consequences of non-performance are far more diffuse and delayed in a 200-million-person bureaucracy than in a 50-household estate.

This produces a counter-intuitive but important diagnostic principle: government organisational failure is not best explained primarily as a problem of corrupt or incompetent individuals occupying office. It is better explained as the predictable scaling-up of a society-wide organisational deficit, now operating with weaker feedback loops, longer chains of delegation, and far larger sums of money in motion. Section 5 traces exactly how this scaling-up plays out, showing that the further a policy travels from a single decision-maker toward a wide implementation chain involving multiple tiers and multiple agencies, the more the underlying weakness is exposed.

5. The Tier Problem: Why Policy Success Shrinks as Implementation Widens

A useful rule of thumb for Nigerian policy-watching: the probability that a policy will be implemented as designed falls roughly in proportion to the number of additional actors, tiers, or agencies whose independent cooperation it requires. A policy that one minister can execute through one department, with funds already in that department’s account, has a fair chance of happening. A policy that requires a federal decision, state-level enforcement, local government compliance, and the voluntary cooperation of millions of private actors who were never consulted has a poor one. This is not because the policy is necessarily wrong, but because each additional handoff is a place where the chain can break, and Nigeria’s organisational weaknesses are present at every link, not just the top one.

Figure 1 (above) and Figure 2: As implementation widens from the individual to cross-tier federal-state coordination, the tendency for follow-through to be sustained falls. The figures are illustrative summaries of the patterns documented throughout this article, not measured statistics from a single dataset.

5.1 Case Study: Fuel Subsidy Removal and the State Government’s Silent Failure

The clearest recent illustration is the May 2023 removal of the petrol subsidy. On his inauguration day, President Bola Tinubu declared that “the fuel subsidy is gone,” and within days the official pump price in Abuja moved from roughly N190 to as high as N617 per litre. This was, organisationally, the easy part: a single federal decision, executed by one regulator (the NNPC Limited), announced and implemented within a week. The federal government did exactly what a single actor with clear authority over one lever can do. It acted, and the price moved.

Everything that happened next belonged to a different, much less organisable category: the transmission of that price shock through transport, food distribution, and household budgets across thirty-six states and 774 local government areas, each with its own transport unions, market structures, and enforcement capacity, or lack of it.

Figure 3: Selected before/after price points following the May 2023 subsidy removal. The federal decision was singular; the transport-fare consequences were mediated entirely through state- and local-level structures that the public discussion of the policy rarely examined.

In Lagos, a commercial bus driver reported that the Brewery Park to Sango fare rose from N500 to N1,200, explicitly because “aside from fuel hike, ‘Agberos’ too will take their own,” meaning the informal levy layer described in Section 2.2 amplified the federal price shock before it reached the passenger. In Enugu, a driver reported intercity fares to Abuja rising from N5,000 to N8,500. At Balogun Market in Lagos, a trader’s daily transport cost rose from N600 to N1,500, and vendors began “lapping,” doubling up in bus seats to split fares, a small, telling sign of households absorbing systemic failure through individual improvisation rather than any institutional cushion.

Public commentary on the subsidy removal overwhelmingly discussed it as a federal story: the President’s decision, the NNPC’s pricing, the federal palliatives programme. Far less attention was paid to the fact that intra-state and intra-city transport, where the policy’s pain was actually felt by ordinary commuters, is substantially a state and local government responsibility. State transport authorities license operators, state and local governments work with (or fail to discipline) unions like NURTW, and state task forces are meant to enforce fare sanity. The subsidy decision was federal; the experience of the subsidy decision was almost entirely mediated by state-level organisational capacity that had already been shown, in Section 2.2, to be extractive and poorly governed before the shock ever arrived. The federal government funded CNG conversion, but most, if not all, state governments did not join in the CNG conversion effort despite transportation being under the state purview. The federal government removed a subsidy; state governments, largely, did not organise a transport response capable of absorbing the shock, and this half of the story received a fraction of the scrutiny.