By: Shafihi Abdulrasheed Oladimeji
It is troubling how we guard our personal five naira coin with the vigilance of a night watchman, yet destroy a million naira government transformers with the casualness of breaking kola nuts. This is the Nigerian paradox: we are angels to ourselves and demons to our collective property. We have mastered the art of “selective ownership consciousness”—treating what belongs to all of us as if it belongs to no one.
If you walk through any government hospitals and you will see medical equipment that costs thousands, but is abandoned to rot. Visit our schools and chairs, ceiling and valuable tools that could have educated hundreds, now serving as expensive paperweights because someone decided to remove one small part worth fifty naira.
The “small damage syndrome” is killing us slowly. A loose screw ignored becomes a collapsed roof. We have turned “small small” destruction into an industry of waste.
The same man who will sleep outside his shop to guard his wares will pass by a broken streetlight in his community and shrug, “na government property.” This is “ownership schizophrenia”—the mental disorder that makes us protective of personal property but destructive toward public assets. Yet these roads, schools, and hospitals are built with our taxes, our oil money, our collective sweat. When we destroy them, we are essentially burning our own inheritance.
Perhaps nothing captures our “collective property hatred” more than our protest culture. Angry about bad governance? Burn the government bus that could have served our ministries. Frustrated about poor roads? Destroy the few streetlights working on those same roads. This is “anger misdirection”—fighting bad governance by making governance worse.
When protesters destroy government property, they are not hurting politicians who drive bulletproof cars and fly private jets. They are hurting themselves—the pregnant woman who will walk further to the health center because the government ambulance was burnt, the student who will learn in darkness because the school generator was destroyed during demonstrations. This is “self-sabotage activism,” and it has become our national sport.
The same hands that will handle government property like enemy equipment will treat personal belongings like precious jewels. A man will maintain his motorcycle for twenty years, but if given a government vehicle to drive, he will run it into the ground within six months. A woman will sweep her compound religiously but dump refuse on the government road beside her house. This “property personality disorder” reveals that we understand maintenance and care—we simply choose not to apply it to shared resources.
Now, the solution begins with “ownership mindset rehabilitation.” We must start teaching our children that government property is family property. Every public tap, every school desk, every hospital bed remains our collective investment in our future. Destroying them is not rebellion—it is suicide by installment.
Until we cure ourselves of this “public property hostility,” we will remain trapped in the cycle of building and destroying, spending and wasting, dreaming and sabotaging. The choice is ours: continue this madness of burning our own inheritance, or embrace the wisdom that says what serves the community serves the individual. The government property we destroy today is the legacy we deny our children tomorrow.
Shafihi Abdulrasheed O.
#PeaceMaster
