Yakubu manage, Nigerians manage -By Prince Charles Dickson PhD

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

It is the language of endurance. The philosophy of the battered but breathing. The poetry of people who have stopped asking whether a thing is right and have begun asking only whether it is survivable. No fuel, no light, no cash, no water, no wages, no certainty, no shame from those in power. Still, the citizen shrugs, adjusts the cracked sandal of hope, and says, Yakubu manage.

Bear it. Cope. Survive this one first.

In that phrase lies the genius and tragedy of Nigeria.

We have made an art form of adaptation. We can improvise in darkness, negotiate with chaos, and laugh while standing 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 stitched together by prayer, irony, stubbornness, and pure refusal to disappear.

But resilience, when overstretched, becomes a silent accomplice to decay.

That is the danger.

Because what begins as survival wisdom can harden into national psychology. A whole people can become so fluent in enduring nonsense that they lose the instinct to reject it. They begin to decorate pain with proverbs, perfume injustice with jokes, and frame suffering as character formation. Before long, hardship is no longer an emergency. It becomes culture. Governance collapses into a weather report. And the citizens, instead of demanding repair, simply dress for the storm.

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

The city is crowded with smiling political faces, oversized confidence, and posters swollen with self-congratulation. Every corner seems to say: Behold your leaders. But what exactly are we beholding? Security? Stability? Functional infrastructure? Public trust? Competence? Or are we merely being asked to admire packaging in place of performance?

The billboard in Nigeria has become a strange cultural artifact. It is often the tallest where results are shortest. It smiles widest where service has thinned into rumor. It rises like a giant curtain, not to reveal governance, but to hide its absence.

When performance is thin, propaganda grows tall.

That is not cynicism. That is pattern recognition.

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

A leader may need a billboard. A failing system depends on it.

That is the real issue.

Because what is being marketed in many of these spaces is not service but symbolism. Not leadership but likeness. Not accountability but aesthetic. The poster says, “Look at me.” The people are asking, “Can we live?” The poster says, “Progress.” The roads say, “Puncture.” The hospitals say, “Bring your own gloves.” The schools say, “Manage.” The power supply says, “Maybe.” Security says, “Pray first.”

This is why Yakubu manage is not just slang. It is political commentary wearing slippers.

It captures the national arrangement in one brutal wink. Citizens have learned to absorb pain the way old walls absorb smoke. Not because they enjoy it, but because the alternative is to collapse under the weight of daily disappointment. So, they laugh. They meme. They mock. They keep moving. They turn hunger into humor and frustration into vocabulary. There is genius in that. 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 people have been lied to for too long, even genuine light begins to look like another trick of the generator. They no longer know how to trust change. Tiny signs of progress are dismissed before they are tested. Every promise sounds like recycled campaign confetti. Every reform feels like a prelude to fresh suffering. Hope itself becomes politically expensive.

That is what mediocre leadership does over time. It does not only damage roads, schools, hospitals, and institutions. It damages public imagination. It injures the people’s ability to believe that better is possible. It turns citizenship into emotional self-defense.

So, Nigerians manage.

They manage inflation that eats salaries before noon.

They manage leaders who speak in polished grammar over broken realities.

They manage insecurity with prayer points and route adjustments.

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

They manage public services that behave like reluctant relatives.

They manage promises that expire faster than bread.

They manage so well that the managers of the mess begin to mistake endurance for approval.

That is the great national misunderstanding.

Silence is not satisfaction. Endurance is not endorsement. Laughter is not consent. The people are not celebrating the pain. They are surviving it. There is a difference, and right-thinking citizens must learn to defend that difference fiercely.

Because a country cannot build its future on managed dysfunction. A republic cannot continue outsourcing dignity to individual toughness. Resilience is noble, yes, but it is not a substitute for responsibility. Citizens are not born to spend their lives “coping” 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 experts at enduring its failures.

That is like praising a passenger for surviving a reckless driver.

Nigeria’s tragedy is not only that we suffer. It is that we have become so creatively adjusted to suffering that those responsible sometimes escape the moral heat they deserve. We adapt too quickly. We forgive too cheaply. We move on too easily. We laugh, and in laughing, sometimes accidentally anesthetize the outrage that should have become civic pressure.

But laughter must not surrender.

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

So yes, let us say it plainly: Yakubu manage, Nigerians manage. We manage bad roads, bad policy, bad optics, bad excuses, and bad leadership dressed in giant smiling posters. We manage because we must. We manage because children must eat, rent must be paid, school fees must somehow appear, and tomorrow, rude as ever, will still arrive.

But management cannot be the horizon of a serious nation.

At some point, the citizens must stop merely enduring the circus and begin questioning the tent, the ringmaster, the ticket sellers, and the clowns in borrowed agbada. At some point, we must insist that governance is not a billboard, not a slogan, not a face on flex, not a convoy, not a social media graphic, not another polished speech asking wounded people to be patient.

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

Until then, the billboards will keep smiling.

And beneath them, the people will keep muttering the most honest political slogan in the country: Yakubu manage. Nigerians manage, and may Nigeria win!