The Burden of Hope, by Kator Ifyalem

There is a unique kind of exhaustion that comes from hoping on a schedule that keeps moving. Young Nigerians did not inherit cynicism as a birthright. Cynicism was built into them, year after year, promise after broken promise, until hope itself started to feel like a liability.

Consider what it means to come of age in the country since the early 2000s. You were born into a democracy still finding its footing, told that military rule was behind you and that civilian government, however flawed, was the platform from which things would improve. You watched elections come and go, each election scripted in the same manner, with manifestos promising power, roads, security and jobs. Incumbents or successors arriving with fresh language but the same instincts. 4 years later, the national grid still collapsing, the naira still sliding, another cohort of graduates still searching for jobs. You did not expect perfection. You expected trajectory. What you got, instead, was a flat line interrupted by crises.

This is the burden specific to this group. Not poverty alone, which Nigeria has always had in abundance, but poverty alongside the full knowledge of what competence looks like elsewhere, delivered in real time through a phone screen. A young Nigerian today can watch, in the same week, a government hospital without diagnostic equipment and a hospital in another country running on precision machinery funded by taxes that actually became infrastructure. The comparison is not abstract or imported from envy, it is immediate, searchable, and almost cruel in its clarity. Each generation before had to imagine what a functioning state looked like. This one gets to watch it happen to other people, live, while living through its absence.

And the absence is not evenly distributed by effort. This is perhaps the sharpest edge of the frustration, the discovery, often made in your 20s, that merit was never quite the operating currency you were promised it would be. You did the coursework, sat the exams, built the portfolio, and still watched positions go to someone’s nephew, someone’s political ally, someone whose only qualification was proximity to power. Nepotism costs you both the job and the premise, the idea that effort and outcome are connected in this country in any reliable way. That loss is harder to recover from than poverty itself, because poverty can be organized around and fought. A broken premise leaves you without a map.

What makes this frustrations of this generation distinct from disillusionment in other places is the compounding of time. Infrastructure decline is not a single failure to be fixed in a budget cycle; it is decades of underinvestment that cannot be reversed inside a single political term, let alone inside the span of prime working years of a particular generation. The power sector problems being discussed today were being discussed in the same terms 20 years ago. The reforms needed in policing, in the judiciary, in the civil service, are the same reforms that were needed when the 30 year-olds of today were being born. The arithmetic becomes unbearable once you do it honestly. If meaningful structural change takes 15 to 20 years even under competent, consistent leadership, leadership this country has rarely sustained for even a presidential term, then the most productive decades in the life of a person may simply run out before the country catches up to where they needed it to be.

This is the particular grief of being young in Nigeria right now, not that change is impossible, but that it may not arrive in time to matter for you personally. You can believe, intellectually, that Nigeria will eventually industrialize, diversify its economy, professionalize its institutions, and produce leadership accountable to something other than patronage. You can believe all of that and still reasonably conclude that it will happen on a timeline that outlives your own usefulness to it, that you will have spent your most capable years waiting for a country that arrives, if it arrives, for someone else’s children rather than your own prime.

That is why so many leave, and why those who stay carry something closer to mourning than optimism. It is not that they have stopped loving the country. It is that loving a country and being able to build a life inside it have become two separate projects, and holding both at once requires a kind of endurance that should not be the baseline expectation of an entire generation.

If there is anything to say honestly to that frustration, it is not reassurance, false comfort insults the scale of what is been lost. It is that the exhaustion is a rational response to real conditions, not a personal failure of patience or faith. Naming it clearly, without the usual performance of resilience Nigerians are expected to perform, is itself a kind of honesty the country owes its young people and has rarely offered. Whatever comes next, reform, rupture, or simply more waiting, it should not require anyone to pretend the wait has not cost them something real.