We are not broken.
Stop writing that in your articles, your tweets, your pitiful op-eds stuffed with soft despair.
We are not statistics of failure.
We are not jigsaw puzzles scattered on the floor, waiting for some saviour to piece us together.
Nigeria broke itself long before we were born.
The walls were already cracked, the ceilings already leaking, the ground already sinking.
We were born into malfunction.
Into a nation stitched together with borrowed thread and bullet holes.
Into a country that forgot to grow up but never forgot to punish.
Yet somehow, they expect us to rise from this wreckage looking polished, grateful, obedient.
But we refuse to inherit the fracture.
Refuse to carry a legacy of failure like a family heirloom.
We are not the continuation of the dysfunction.
We are the rupture. The splinter. The sound of a generation refusing to fit into the spaces designed to erase us.
This is not a plea for fixing.
This is a statement of fact, we are not broken.
We are the breaking.
And when we break, the whole rotten architecture will feel it.
We dey come. Ready or not.
The real delinquent is the system that raised us. A country where education is not a ladder but a loop — round and round, back to the same dust. Over 18.5 million children out of school, the highest in the world. And for those of us who make it through the gates, what’s waiting? Classrooms that look like forgotten morgues. Teachers who haven’t been paid, teaching lessons from books older than our parents.
We graduate into streets paved with promises and potholes. The certificates we hold? Decorative. Over 53% of Nigerian youth are unemployed or underemployed… that’s not just failure, that’s deliberate sabotage. They didn’t build a system to prepare us; they built one to paralyze us.
Every institution that should nurture us — education, healthcare, justice — is an empty shell. Hospitals are waiting rooms for death. Courts auction justice to the highest bidder. Policy is just another way to redistribute poverty upwards.
They blame us for being sharp, for hustling, for scheming, but what did they expect? Nigeria didn’t just neglect us; it trained us.
Trained us to dodge, to deal, to survive by any means. Now they call us threats because we learned their lessons too well.
But when survival becomes the syllabus, what choice do you really have?
They trained us in desperation, so we graduated in defiance.
They point fingers when we cut corners,
But how else do you navigate a maze designed to trap you?
In this Nigeria, survival is a subject with no textbook, just instinct.
So we created our own economies.
Yahoo boys rewrote the rules of profit,
skit makers turned phone cameras into studios,
tech bros built empires from shared WiFi in Yaba.
If content won’t go viral, maybe a betting slip will.
If na influencer fit chop, then na selfie go feed us.
We call it Plan B, because Plan A was stolen — auctioned off in oil blocks and budget padding.
And we’re not alone. Across the world, our peers are hustling against collapsing systems. The gig worker in Paris, the sugar baby in Miami, the content creator in Johannesburg — everyone is selling something: their time, their talent, their timelines.
But here, the hustle is heavier. It’s not just about side income; it’s escape or extinction. That’s why we turn every tweet, every TikTok, every line of code into a lifeboat. In this place, survival is not a sin. It’s the only language the system taught us to speak fluently.
But even when we survive, they still want us invisible.
That’s why we wear chains like armour, heavy, shiny, deliberate.
Why the boys dye their hair loud yellow,
why the girls bleach their skin to near-translucence.
If the system will not see us unless we glitter, then glitter we must.
Our fashion, our filters, our flex — all rebellion.
They say we’re vain, but vanity is survival when poverty tries to make you invisible. When your government acts like you don’t exist unless you’re a threat, you show up loud. You paint your life in neon just so they know you were here.
Pop culture became both shield and sword. We flex not just to show off, but to remind ourselves we’re still breathing. Because in this country, even beauty is politics.
The lighter your skin, the softer the world treats you.
The richer your clothes, the less they search your pockets.
We built visibility out of defiance. We said, “If you won’t see us, we’ll make you look.”
But even when we glow, they still want us small.
They call it respect, we call it a muzzle.
From the jump, they teach us not to question elders, to swallow our tongues in the face of authority.
They dress it up as humility, obedience, culture, but really, it’s fear in wrapper and agbada.
The kind that makes you kneel first, even when you’re being wronged.
Obedience here isn’t discipline, it’s defence. A survival strategy. Because in Nigeria, questioning can kill you. Ask the boy with dreadlocks on the corner, who has to explain his hair to a policeman with an itchy trigger finger. Or the girl with ripped jeans and an iPhone — automatically branded as ashawo, as if confidence is a crime.
They don’t just police our bodies, they police our spirits…
The girls? The length of your skirt, the pitch of your voice, the curve of your waist… everything must pass inspection.
Be too loud, too visible, too free? They’ll shame you back into silence.
They want us obedient so we don’t revolt.
Respectable so we don’t resist.
But we’ve clocked it — it’s not culture, it’s control.
And we’re done kneeling.
We tried obedience — then they shot us anyway.
October 20, 2020. Lekki Toll Gate. The night the sky swallowed gunfire and the flag bled red. We watched it live, watched the illusion of democracy die in 4K, streaming on Instagram like it was just another Nollywood tragedy. Only this time, it was us. Our friends. Our generation, asking not to die, shot down by the very country that raised us to kneel.
#EndSARS was more than a protest. It was our awakening. Political, existential, spiritual. The day we realized that respectability won’t save you. That saying “sir” won’t stop the bullet. That even when you sing the anthem, the state hears noise, not citizens.
We carry that bruise, unhealed and open.
Every “Soro Soke” is a scar, a memory, a refusal to forget.
They killed bodies, but the rage survived.
It’s still here, humming beneath our tongues.
Betrayal here is not a glitch — it’s tradition.
Nigeria has perfected it, turned it into art.
Elections are just heists in daylight, carried out with ballots instead of guns. The judiciary? A theater where scripts are written in banknotes and judgments are delivered like plot twists nobody asked for.
We saw it again in 2023. They told us our votes would count, but the numbers disappeared before our eyes… deleted, rewritten, padded. The courts watched, nodded, and stamped the fraud with official English. Democracy here is a costume they wear every four years, just to remind us that the joke is still on us.
There’s no justice here, only rituals of power.
The same faces, the same promises, the same betrayals wrapped in fresh slogans.
Yet they still ask why we don’t trust them.
How do you trust a country that treats your hope like collateral damage?
We’re not alone in this anger. You can hear it in the chants across the world — in the streets of Paris where the yellow vests burned barricades against a government that prices them out of their own lives. In Chile, where students lit up the streets over a metro fare hike, because sometimes rage starts with something as small as a bus ticket but ends with a country on fire. In Hong Kong, umbrellas turned into shields against state violence. In America, “No justice, no peace” echoed after George Floyd’s last breath, a death watched live just like ours at Lekki.
It’s the same frustration, the same recycled oppression, unemployment, inequality, climate collapse, corruption in expensive suits. The world keeps telling our generation to wait, but time is bankrupt everywhere.
Yet Nigeria doesn’t just export oil, we export resistance. Afrobeats is protest in rhythm. Our slang travels — “Soro Soke,” “Shey you dey whine me” — catchphrases of defiance, coded survival. On TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, …we’re rewriting the narrative. Our culture is moving global not because we’re free, but because we’re fluent in the language of fighting back. And while they’re busy mocking our slang, policing our playlists, we’re busy building alternatives.
If the country won’t feed us, we’ll build our own kitchens.
That’s what we’ve done, crafting economies from thin air and bad WiFi. In Yaba, the hum of laptops drowns out NEPA failures, tech bros and sisters coding new exits. In the alleys of Instagram, skit makers and influencers monetize every click, every meme, every second of borrowed joy. The creative industry is no longer a side hustle, it’s an underground economy with its own currency of clout and creativity.
And those who’ve escaped? The ones who japa’d, send us remittances like lifelines, proof that survival is portable.
We’ve turned creativity into protest. Innovation into escape. We are building because they refuse to. Every dance trend, every startup, every beat that makes it to Billboard is a middle finger wrapped in rhythm.
We are not broken. We are the breaking.
We are the countdown…
the ticking beneath the country’s rotting floorboards.
The sound you hear when the system pretends to sleep, but knows its time is up.
Every beat of our music, every viral slang, every hacked survival is a warning bell.
We are the sound before the collapse.
The glitch before the blackout.
We’re not begging to be fixed. We’re not waiting for reforms stitched together by the same tailors of oppression. We’re here to flip the script, burn the old playbook, and write a new language, one where respect is earned, not demanded. Where leadership is duty, not inheritance. Where freedom is not an anthem lyric, but air.
You taught us silence, but now we speak in frequencies you can’t decode. Our voice is the scream stuck in this nation’s throat, and soon, it will erupt… loud enough to wake the dead, sharp enough to slice through your illusions.
So keep watching.
Keep policing, keep dismissing, keep mocking.
But remember …
We are not broken.
We are the breaking.
And when we break, there will be nothing left to rebuild in your image.
Only ours.