Yakubu runs, Nigerians run, by Prince Charles Dickson – THISAGE

PhD of Prince Charles Dickson

There’s a Nigerian phrase that sounds like a joke until you sit long enough and realize it’s also an obituary for expectation: Yakubu succeeds.

It is the language of resistance. The philosophy of the battered but breathing. The poetry of those who have stopped asking themselves if something is right and have started to ask themselves only if it has survived. No fuel, no electricity, no cash, no water, no wages, no certainty, no shame on the part of those in power. However, the citizen shrugs, fixes his broken sandal of hope and says: Yakubu makes it.

Bear with it. Cope. Survive this first.

In that sentence lies the genius and tragedy of Nigeria.

We have created an art form of adaptation. We can improvise in the dark, negotiate with chaos, and laugh while knee-deep in dysfunction. We know how to queue without order, commute without roads, study without electricity, trade without capital and dream without institutional support. The average Nigerian is a miracle put together by prayer, irony, stubbornness and sheer refusal to disappear.

But resilience, when put to the test, becomes a silent accomplice to decay.

This is the danger.

Because what begins as survival wisdom can turn into national psychology. An entire people can become so casual about putting up with nonsense that they lose the instinct to reject it. They begin to decorate pain with proverbs, flavor injustice with jokes and frame suffering as character building. In a short time, difficulties will no longer be an emergency. It becomes culture. Governance is reduced to a weather report. And the citizens, instead of asking for reparations, simply dress for the storm.

This is where Lengdung Tungchamma’s irritation with political billboards in Jos becomes more than a complaint about visual pollution. It becomes a diagnosis.

The city is crowded with smiling political faces, boundless confidence and posters bloated with self-satisfaction. Every corner seems to say: here are your leaders. But what exactly are we seeing? Safety? Stability? Functional infrastructure? Public trust? Competence? Or are we simply being asked to admire the packaging instead of the performance?

The billboard in Nigeria has become a strange cultural artifact. It is often the highest where the results are shortest. He smiles more where the service has been reduced to hearsay. It rises like a giant curtain, not to reveal governance, but to hide its absence.

When performance is poor, propaganda grows.

This is not cynicism. This is pattern recognition.

Yet, to be fair, images have their place. Political image management is not inherently evil. Public communication matters. Campaigns need visibility. Governance in the media age cannot pretend that images do not shape public consciousness. But a company must know the difference between communication and concealment, between visibility and vanity, between public relations and public deception.

A leader may need a billboard. The failure of a system depends on this.

This is the real problem.

Because what is marketed in many of these spaces is not a service but a symbolism. Not leadership but similarity. Not responsibility but aesthetics. The poster says, “Look at me.” People ask, “Can we live?” The poster says: “Progress”. The streets say: “Puncture”. Hospitals say, “Bring your own gloves.” Schools say, “Manage.” The feeder says, “Maybe.” Security says, “Pray first.”

This is why Yakubu handling is not just slang. It’s political commentary in slippers.

It captures the national order in a brutal wink. Citizens have learned to absorb pain the same way old walls absorb smoke. Not because they enjoy it, but because the alternative is to collapse under the weight of daily disappointment. Then they laugh. Memes. They make fun. They keep moving. They turn hunger into humor and frustration into vocabulary. There is genius in this. There is also danger.

A traumatized society can become suspicious even of improvement.

This is one of the saddest consequences of prolonged bad governance. When you lie to people for too long, even real light starts to feel like another generator trick. They no longer know how to trust change. Small signs of progress are rejected before being tested. Every promise sounds like recycled confetti from the election campaign. Every reform seems like a prelude to new suffering. Hope itself becomes politically costly.

This is what mediocre leadership does over time. It doesn’t just damage roads, schools, hospitals and institutions. It damages the public imagination. It hurts people’s ability to believe that better is possible. Transform citizenship into emotional self-defense.

So, Nigerians get away with it.

They manage the inflation that eats up salaries before noon.

They manage leaders who speak with refined grammar about fragmented realities.

They manage insecurity with prayer points and route adjustments.

They manage unemployment with side scams, side jokes and side tears.

They run public services behaving like reluctant relatives.

They manage promises that expire faster than bread.

They succeed so well that the managers of the mess begin to confuse tolerance with approval.

This is the great national misunderstanding.

Silence is not satisfaction. Resistance is not approval. Laughter is not consent. People don’t celebrate pain. They are surviving. There is a difference, and right-thinking citizens must learn to defend it fiercely.

Because a country cannot build its future on managing dysfunctions. A republic cannot continue to subordinate dignity to individual tenacity. Resilience is noble, yes, but it does not replace responsibility. Citizens were not born to spend their lives “dealing with” what leadership should have corrected. There is nothing heroic about having to normalize avoidable suffering.

A government should not be applauded because the people have become expert at tolerating its failures.

It’s like praising a passenger for surviving a reckless driver.

The tragedy of Nigeria is not just that we suffer. The fact is that we have adapted so creatively to suffering that those responsible sometimes escape the moral warmth they deserve. We adapt too quickly. We forgive too cheaply. We move on too easily. We laugh and, by laughing, sometimes we accidentally anesthetize the indignation that should have become civic pressure.

But laughter must not give up.

Humor is one of our best weapons, but it must not be the pillow on which responsibility falls asleep.

So yes, let’s say it clearly: Yakubu manage, Nigerians manage. We run bad roads, bad policies, bad optics, bad excuses and bad leadership dressed in giant smiling posters. We succeed because we have to. We get by because the kids have to eat, the rent has to be paid, the school fees have to show up somehow, and tomorrow, rough as ever, will come anyway.

But management cannot be the horizon of a serious nation.

At some point, citizens must stop simply putting up with the circus and start questioning the big top, the ringmaster, the ticket sellers, and the clowns in the borrowed agbada. At some point, we must insist that governance is not a billboard, not a slogan, not a flexible face, not a convoy, not a social media graphic, not another polished speech asking hurting people to be patient.

It’s the bread. It’s light. It’s safety. It’s justice. It’s trust. It’s competence. It is the ordinary dignity of a people not forced to make pain a philosophy.

Until then, the billboards will continue to smile

And beneath them, people will continue to mutter the most honest political slogan in the country: Yakubu manage. Nigerians succeed, and may Nigeria win!

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