By Philip Obazee

Nigeria’s public-life problems are too often narrated as if they were reducible to one variable: “government failure.” That diagnosis is sometimes correct, often important, and always tempting because it is clean. It has a clear villain, a clear demand, and a familiar rhetoric. But the clean story is not the whole story. There is another layer of explanation, less convenient, more uncomfortable, and frequently ignored because it distributes responsibility more widely: norm governance.

Norm governance is the social machinery by which a community decides what is acceptable, what is shameful, what is honorable, and what is beneath dignity. It is not written in the constitution. It is written in glances, murmurs, rebukes, praise, exclusion, silence, and the quiet recalibration of “what people like us do.” It is the difference between a society where a public offense triggers instant social correction and a society where the same offense passes unremarked, unpunished, and eventually normalized.

When norms are weak, or more precisely, when the wrong norms are strong, law becomes expensive, inconsistent, and ultimately fragile. You can build infrastructure. You can pass ordinances. You can announce new agencies. But if a community has settled into tolerance for conduct that diminishes public life, the state becomes a firefighter trying to extinguish a cultural arson that citizens keep relighting. This is why some of Nigeria’s most visible failures persist even when the material means to solve them occasionally exist.

Consider a mundane, illustrative example, public sanitation. Benin City had public toilets from the 1950s through the late 1970s, and yet public urination still occurred in common spaces. The fact matters not because it is unique, but because it is diagnostic. It suggests that certain problems are not only about the absence of infrastructure. They are also about the presence of permissiveness. When deviance carries no social cost, the availability of alternatives does not automatically translate into uptake.

This is where Nigerians must stop hiding behind the most overused and least examined phrase in our civic vocabulary: “It is our culture.” That sentence is usually not an explanation; it is a waiver. It is a rhetorical device that converts a correctable practice into an identity. It makes reform look like betrayal. It treats dysfunction as heritage. It declares that dignity is negotiable because “we are different.” And it quietly trains the next generation to confuse endurance with authenticity.

But culture is not a fossil. Culture is a set of repeated choices. “Who we are” is not an excuse for what we keep tolerating. Nigeria’s real cultural story is not that Nigerians cannot do better; it is that Nigerians often do better when norms are clear and sanctions are credible. Nigerians abroad do not urinate in public spaces. Nigerians abroad queue. Nigerians abroad respect shared infrastructure. Nigerians abroad comply with civic rules not because they have been genetically transformed, but because the normative environment is different; expectations are explicit, enforcement is consistent, and shame attaches to violations.

So the question is not whether Nigerians are capable of public dignity. The question is what Nigeria chooses to honor at home.

Norm governance, properly understood, is the architecture of public dignity. It is the set of invisible constraints that makes a city livable without turning every street corner into a police checkpoint. It is how a society produces clean public spaces, quiet public transport, orderly traffic, functional queues, trustworthy institutions, and a general sense that “this place respects itself.”

In economics, we would say that norms solve coordination problems. Each citizen’s behavior is partly a best response to what they expect others to do and what they expect others will tolerate. If I believe that everyone else will litter, and no one will shame littering, then my incentive to carry trash home weakens. If I believe that everyone else will jump the queue, and the queue-jumpers will be rewarded, then queueing becomes irrational. If I believe that public resources are a free-for-all, then restraint looks like foolishness. The collective outcome is a low-dignity equilibrium;everyone complains, everyone adjusts downward, and everyone contributes—sometimes reluctantly, to the very environment they condemn.

The solution is not moral preaching alone. It is governance, normative governance, built on credible enforcement mechanisms that do not depend exclusively on formal law. Law matters, but law is not enough. In a context where policing capacity is limited and formal institutions are subject to corruption, rule-of-law enforcement becomes expensive, selective, and easy to undermine. When enforcement becomes selective, citizens stop respecting the rule and start negotiating it. The law becomes a price tag. Compliance becomes optional. That is the death of public dignity.

Norms can do what laws struggle to do; create cheap, pervasive enforcement. A stare is cheaper than a fine. A public rebuke is cheaper than an arrest. Social disapproval travels faster than a court case. Exclusion from honor is more feared than a small penalty. The key is not cruelty; it is clarity. A society must decide that certain behaviors are not purely illegal but disgraceful.

Nigeria has moral institutions capable of producing that clarity, if they choose to act like it.

Traditional rulers, religious leaders, market leaders, professional guilds, youth organizations, and neighborhood associations all have one comparative advantage the state often lacks: local legitimacy. They can speak in the language people recognize as binding. They can tie behavior to communal honor. They can make norms “common knowledge”, not simply known, but known that others know, and known that others will enforce. In game-theoretic terms, they can shift expectations, thereby shifting behavior.

This is why the burden of norm reconstruction cannot rest on the federal government alone. The federal government is too distant, too politically fragmented, and too capacity-constrained to manage the fine-grained moral economy of everyday life. State governments can do more, and local governments should do far more, but even they cannot occupy the space that informal authority occupies in Nigerian society. Nigeria is not just a legal order; it is a moral order. And moral orders are shaped less by statutes than by sanctioning communities.

The tragedy is that many of these moral authorities have traded their normative capital for political access, commercial influence, and ceremonial prestige. They perform culture but do not govern norms. They crown, celebrate, and bless, but too rarely rebuke. They negotiate patronage but do not enforce standards. They lament decline but do not organize restoration.

If Nigeria is serious about public dignity, that must change.

We need to stop treating “tradition” as a museum and start treating it as a governance system. Tradition must not only preserve festivals; it must preserve standards. It must not only confer titles; it must confer responsibilities. The honor of a title should be inseparable from the duty to define what is dishonorable.

What would that look like in practice?

First, public commitments. Traditional councils and religious bodies should publish simple civic charters, short, concrete, non-negotiable expectations for public conduct in their jurisdictions: no public urination, no dumping refuse in drains, no open defecation, no vandalizing public infrastructure, no assaulting sanitation workers, no obstructing traffic with impunity. Make it explicit. Repeat it. Put it where people cannot pretend not to know.

Second, community enforcement structures. Norms require enforcement, and enforcement requires institutions. Ward-level and street-level civic committees, composed of respected elders, youth leaders, women’s associations, market unions, and local security actors, should be empowered to sanction norm violations. Not through mob justice, not through violence, not through humiliation as entertainment, but through structured sanctions; community service, public apologies, exclusion from community privileges, denial of ceremonial recognition, and referral to lawful authorities when necessary.

Third, dignity branding. Nigeria already understands the power of status. That power is often misused, but it exists. Use it for civic ends. Make cleanliness a mark of prestige. Make orderly markets a badge of honor. Celebrate communities that keep public spaces clean. Recognize market associations that enforce sanitation norms. Award traditional titles not just for wealth but for civic stewardship. Shift the reward function.

Fourth, align the state and the moral authorities. Norms cannot substitute for infrastructure. If you demand cleanliness but provide no bins, no sewage systems, no reliable sanitation services, you are setting people up for failure. The state must play its part; build and maintain facilities, ensure waste collection, provide public toilets, design public spaces intelligently, and enforce laws fairly. But the moral authorities must play their part too; build compliance, shape expectations, and punish disgrace through social sanction.

Fifth, kill the “culture excuse.” This deserves its own paragraph because it is the rhetorical cancer that metastasizes into civic decay. “It is our culture” must become an embarrassing thing to say when used to justify public indecency, disorder, or corruption. Culture is not a license for disrespect. Culture is a discipline. Any culture worth honoring disciplines its members toward dignity. If a practice produces filth, humiliation, chaos, or harm, then it is not culture; it is a habit. And habits can be changed.

This is where the op-ed’s thesis becomes sharp; norm governance is the production of public dignity. It is not a debate about identity; it is a project of civic self-respect.

Nigeria’s identity is not in question. Our languages, our histories, our plural traditions, and our resilience are not in question. What is in question is our willingness to govern ourselves in public. And public dignity is not a luxury for rich countries. It is a condition for becoming a rich country. Cleanliness, order, and basic civic restraint are not Western affectations; they are preconditions for functional markets, healthy populations, and trustworthy institutions.

There is a developmental argument here that Nigerians rarely make explicitly but should. Norm governance reduces transaction costs. It makes commerce easier. It reduces health burdens. It protects public infrastructure. It increases productivity by decreasing friction. It improves a society’s capacity to coordinate large-scale projects because citizens learn that shared rules are real. When norms are weak, everything becomes expensive. You need security everywhere. You need enforcement everywhere. You need “connections” to get basic things done. Your roads decay faster because people treat public goods as nobody’s property. Your hospitals fill with preventable disease because sanitation collapses. Your cities become stressful because every interaction is a negotiation.

You cannot industrialize a low-dignity equilibrium. You cannot build a high-trust economy on a low-trust street culture. You cannot create a serious society while honoring unserious conduct.

This is why Nigerians should stop asking only, “What will government do?” and also ask, “What will we refuse to tolerate?” The second question is not a distraction from politics; it is a prerequisite for political improvement. A citizenry that tolerates public disorder will tend to tolerate political disorder. A citizenry that cannot enforce basic norms locally will struggle to hold elites accountable nationally. A citizenry that treats rules as optional in the street will struggle to demand rule-of-law in the state.

Norm governance is political education by lived practice.

Some will object: “But poverty causes these things.” Poverty matters, and deprivation pushes people into survival behavior. Yet poverty does not force public urination when alternatives exist; it does not force dumping refuse into drains; it does not force the destruction of public infrastructure. Moreover, poverty does not explain why the same people behave differently when the normative environment changes. The lesson is not to blame the poor; it is to recognize that norms mediate material constraints. Even in poor settings, norms can produce clean markets and orderly streets if communities decide to make dignity non-negotiable.

Others will object: “The government should enforce laws.” Yes. But insisting on law enforcement while neglecting norm enforcement is like insisting on a roof while neglecting foundations. If policing is corrupt or inconsistent, law enforcement becomes arbitrary, and arbitrariness destroys legitimacy. Norm enforcement can supplement law enforcement by making compliance socially rewarded and noncompliance socially costly.

Nigeria needs a division of labor: the state provides infrastructure and fair legal enforcement; moral authorities and civic communities produce compliance and dignity.

If we are honest, we already know the solution. Nigerian communities have, at various times and in various places, enforced strong norms, especially around respect, family honor, and communal reputation. The problem is not that Nigerians cannot enforce norms. The problem is that we often enforce the wrong ones. We enforce status competitions. We enforce deference to wealth. We enforce silence about powerful people’s misconduct. We enforce the performative rituals of respect, while permitting the substantive violations of public dignity.

We must invert that. Let Nigeria become a place where money without civic stewardship is socially cheap. Let titles without moral leadership be socially worthless. Let religious piety without public decency be socially exposed as hollow. Let “culture” without discipline be socially mocked, not celebrated.

This is the fundamental point: Nigeria’s public dignity will not be delivered by government alone because public dignity is not produced mainly by government. It is produced by a society’s willingness to sanction itself; to define shame and honor correctly, to coordinate around higher standards, and to refuse the self-degrading equilibrium that too many have normalized.

Nigeria is a country of extraordinary intelligence, energy, and creativity. But talent alone does not produce a dignified public sphere. Dignity is produced by discipline. Discipline is produced by norms. And norms are produced by leaders, formal and informal, who are willing to say, “Not here. Not us. Not anymore.”

If traditional rulers want to remain relevant beyond ceremonies, let them become governors of norms. If religious leaders want to be more than entertainers of congregations, let them become stewards of public decency. If local elites want the honor they claim, let them sponsor sanitation systems and enforce community charters. If youth want a future, let them stop romanticizing disorder as “freedom” and start treating dignity as the real rebellion.

Nigeria’s future will not be won by rhetoric about identity. It will be won by daily choices about dignity. That is norm governance: not who we are, but what we choose to honor.

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Philip Obazee retired as a managing director and head of derivatives from Macquarie Asset Management – a global asset management company with office in Philadelphia, PA, USA, and currently, he is the founder and chief executive officer of Polymetrics Americas Research.