We know the Nigeria where you calculate generator fuel costs before deciding whether to study at night. Where “see you tomorrow” means nothing if ASUU strikes again. Where your uncle’s friend’s cousin is the only route to a job interview, not your degree. Where we’ve made peace with the fact that our best exports are our people: those who leave and send money back to keep the ones who stayed afloat.

We know this Nigeria so well that we’ve developed a dark fluency in it. We know how much to pay at checkpoints without being told. We know which potholes to expect on which roads in which months. We know that “please come back next week” means they’ve lost your file. We know that when the President promises change, we should screenshot fuel prices now for comparison later.

This is not cynicism. This is survival.

But here is what troubles me most: we have become so fluent in managing dysfunction that we have mistaken endurance for virtue. We celebrate “Nigerian resilience” as if suffering well is an achievement. We applaud people who “make it” despite the system, but we rarely ask why the system remains broken in the first place. We’ve turned coping mechanisms into culture.

The Nigeria we dream of, then, cannot simply be the one where things “work better.” We’ve set our dreams too low. We dream of stable electricity as if it were a miracle, of police who don’t extort as if they were saints, of hospitals with equipment as if it were a luxury. Our dreams have been hollowed out by what we know.

So let me dream differently.

I dream of a Nigeria where young people do not have to perform trauma to be taken seriously. Where your story doesn’t need to include how you studied under candlelight or trekked ten kilometres to school for adults to nod and call you “focused.” I dream of a Nigeria where boring success is possible, where you can simply be competent, do your work and build a life without needing a miracle or a godfather.

I dream of a Nigeria that stops treating its youth like waiting rooms. We are not “leaders of tomorrow”; tomorrow has been coming for forty years. We are capable now, innovative now, ready now. But this Nigeria makes us wait for permission from a generation that inherited a functioning country and left us this.

Most radically, I dream of a Nigeria where we admit that “the Nigerian spirit” should not have to be this strong. Our capacity to endure should not be our national identity. We should be allowed to thrive, not just survive.

The gap between these Nigerias is not a resource problem; it is a choice problem. We have the oil, the people, the creativity, the tech hubs, the artists and the athletes. What we lack is the collective decision to stop accepting dysfunction as destiny.

And here is the uncomfortable truth: the Nigeria we know will remain until the generation inheriting it refuses to manage it the way it has always been managed. Until we stop celebrating our ability to cope and start demanding our right not to have to.

The Nigeria we dream of is not utopia. It is the minimum. And we should be angry that the minimum feels like dreaming.