Somewhere in Nigeria today, a project that will never work is being commissioned. The contract award is televised. The ribbon is cut long before the institution that will keep the asset alive has even been imagined. Nigeria has perfected the politics of commencement. The political reward is front-loaded, while the developmental work is left for later. When the borehole fails, the classroom walls begin to peel, or the seedlings die, the verdict arrives with equal certainty – Nigerians lack a maintenance culture. The explanation has become so similar that it is rarely questioned. But what if what we call a maintenance culture is not an innate cultural problem at all, but the predictable outcome of how Nigeria has chosen to organise development?
The problem begins with how we imagine development. Nigerian institutions are organised around infrastructure and tangible resources such as roads, school blocks, boreholes and seedlings. These are budgeted for, procured, commissioned and photographed. Officials are less comfortable with relations: who holds rights in the tree, through what arrangements a community decides how to maintain a borehole, what capacity survives the contractor, and what claims citizens possess after the programme ends. These relations determine whether an object becomes a collective asset or merely remains an expenditure.
This pattern is often described as an absence of state capacity. The diagnosis is incomplete, though. Nigeria can license a telecommunications revolution, transform tax collection and coordinate city-scale land reclamation where property rights are clear and assets bankable. It struggles where value is ecological, customary or collective, and sustained through human practices across decades. Nigeria can manufacture land when it becomes real estate. It struggles to preserve land as a living system. This selective capacity underpins Nigeria’s so-called maintenance culture.
Listen to the language of government. Farmers are beneficiaries. Young people are beneficiaries. Women, communities and small businesses are beneficiaries. A beneficiary receives, a partner produces. The language of aid has gradually become a development ontology. Government acts, citizens are acted upon, and procurement becomes the universal verb. Need trees? Award contracts. Need classrooms? Award contracts. Need maintenance? Award another contract.
Contracting is necessary and public procurement is unavoidable. The problem begins when contracting substitutes for the harder work of government by assigning rights, organising producers, coordinating incentives and creating institutions that outlive payment. The state purchases outputs where it should cultivate society’s capacity to reproduce them. The difference between the Nigerian and Nigerien approaches to the Great Green Wall illustrates this clearly. In Niger, farmers regenerated millions of hectares from living root systems beneath barren land. The decisive infrastructure was not the seedlings but a relationship. Farmers gained recognised control over trees, giving them a material interest in protecting and reproducing them.
Niger is no model state. It is a model domain. It built its green wall by making farmers custodians of trees. Nigeria attempted to build one by making the government the purchaser of seedlings.
This is the material core of the maintenance question. Nigerians meticulously service generators, preserve ageing danfo engines, maintain market stalls, churches, mosques and town-union halls. Communities contribute to buy transformers and erect electricity poles, only for their investment to be treated as a donation to the utility company. The same people behave differently under different relationships to an asset. We maintain what we own, what we depend upon, and what we stand to protect. Maintenance culture is not an independent cause but an institutional outcome wearing the costume of social pathology.
Culture matters, but culture is made. After decades of development delivered through procurement, citizens have learned to demand in the language of receipt: our road, our empowerment, our share of the national cake. The state shapes what citizens think development looks like, and citizens reward governments for reproducing it. The patron state produces the beneficiary citizen, who in turn reproduces the patron state.
TrackaNG and GovSpend have helped move public scrutiny beyond appropriations and announcements, from promises to projects and from budgets to disbursements. They insist that the political story continues after the ribbon is cut. It is no longer enough to ask whether the contractor supplied the seedlings or completed the planting contract.
We must also ask who maintains the project, who holds enforceable rights in it, what institutional capacity remains after the programme ends, and why restoring a living landscape was conceived primarily as a procurement problem. They teach Nigerians to follow not only the money, but also the relationship.
Collective wealth is not simply what a society owns. It is what a society can reliably reproduce. A seawall and a watershed are both forms of wealth. So are a farmer registry that survives a minister, a community with enforceable standing, and civic organisations that expand citizens’ capabilities. Bertolt Brecht imagined a government responding to failure by dissolving the people and electing another. Every lament about Nigeria’s maintenance culture echoes that satire. The real question is whether state incentives produce clients waiting for projects or citizens capable of co-producing collective wealth.
People also shape the state through what they demand, reward and refuse. The state, having authored much of the present arrangement and possessing greater power to change it, must make co-production worthwhile and give citizens standing, not merely projects. Civil society, however, need not wait. Reforming public demand is one reform government cannot veto. Neither side is helpless, nor needs neither to wait for the other before acting.
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