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,
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