Asher's Blog

There is a saying in my native language that translates roughly like this: a rich person among a hundred poor people is also a poor person.

The person may have money, a beautiful home, several cars and access to opportunities that others do not have. But if the surrounding community is unsafe, unhealthy, uneducated and unable to prosper, that person’s wealth will spend much of its energy compensating for public failure.

They will provide private electricity because the grid does not work. They will buy water because public supply is unreliable. They will hire security because the streets are unsafe. They will pay for private schools, private healthcare and private transport. They may buy an expensive vehicle, but it will still enter the same pothole. They may live behind a high wall, but their business depends on employees, suppliers and customers who live outside it.

Private wealth can purchase insulation; it cannot purchase complete separation from society. This is why private excellence cannot compensate for public failure. A few successful individuals and companies cannot permanently thrive inside institutions that waste time, destroy trust and make ordinary life unnecessarily difficult. At some point, the condition of the road enters the company’s accounts. The quality of education enters its hiring. Insecurity enters its insurance and operating costs. Weak healthcare enters attendance and productivity. Corruption enters the price of every transaction.

If those of us who have succeeded retreat entirely into private solutions, we may become comfortable, but we will not become truly prosperous.

Your wealth is doing work it should not have to do

In a functioning society, private income can be used primarily to build assets, support a family, create businesses, invest in ideas and enjoy life. In a failing public environment, the same income must first reproduce the basic systems that taxes and institutions were supposed to provide.

That is a private tax on public failure; a business buys diesel and generators. It purchases multiple internet connections because no single provider is dependable. It hires drivers because commuting is exhausting. It pays for additional security, repairs vehicles more frequently and loses productive hours to congestion. It may provide health insurance, transport and emergency support because the public safety net is too weak for employees to withstand a shock.

Many of these benefits are good, and responsible employers should care for their people. But we should recognise what is happening economically. Capital that could have funded research, machinery, expansion, salaries or lower prices is being used to replace missing public capacity.

Nigeria’s power problem illustrates the scale of the burden. The World Bank has estimated that unreliable electricity costs the country tens of billions of dollars each year; a widely cited estimate is about $29 billion annually. Businesses do not experience that number as an abstract national statistic. They experience it through fuel, maintenance, damaged equipment, interrupted work and opportunities they decide not to pursue.

The same logic applies to roads; a bad road does not merely create discomfort. It consumes fuel, damages vehicles, delays deliveries, reduces the number of customers a worker can serve and makes every appointment less predictable. Those costs eventually appear in prices, margins, wages and investment decisions.

The rich person is still rich in comparison with the people around them. But their wealth is working far harder than it should.

Lagos is losing money in traffic

I remember returning to Lagos and becoming genuinely angry about the condition of roads in some of the city’s most prominent areas. A journey that should have taken twenty minutes could take one hour and thirty minutes. I was losing time, but I was also thinking about the thousands of businesses losing the same time.

Why should a major road in Victoria Island remain bad? Why should important roads in Lekki and Ikoyi flood repeatedly? Why should an area such as Agungi experience the same flooding so consistently that residents organise their lives around it? Rain in Lagos is not a surprise. The rainy season is not an unexpected event that arrives without warning.

When the same places flood year after year, the problem is no longer merely weather. It is planning, drainage capacity, land use, waste management, maintenance, enforcement and institutional coordination.

The economic loss is enormous. A study by the Lagos-based Danne Institute estimated that commuters lose an average of 2.21 hours each working day to congestion and placed the annual economic loss at roughly ₦3.8 trillion at the time of the study. Any estimate of this kind depends on assumptions and should not be treated as perfect precision. But nobody who has worked in Lagos needs a model to know the direction of the effect.

Suppose one million workers each lose one productive hour. That is one million hours of human life that cannot be recovered. It is time not spent serving a customer, developing a skill, exercising, resting, raising a child or building a company. Multiply that by working days and by the opportunity cost of each person, and congestion becomes a major economic policy issue rather than a private inconvenience.

The government also loses. Lower productivity means less business income, less consumption, weaker corporate performance and ultimately less tax capacity. Poor roads raise the cost of logistics, which raises prices and reduces the number of transactions that can occur. A state can postpone road maintenance to save money in a budget and lose far more through the economy.

Time is public infrastructure. A city that gives people back their time increases its productive capacity without discovering a new natural resource.

Flooding is not an annual surprise

Flooding in Lagos is a complex problem; the city is low-lying and coastal. Climate change, intense rainfall, sea-level rise, rapid urbanisation, construction on natural drainage paths, inadequate infrastructure and waste blocking channels can all contribute. It would be dishonest to suggest that clearing drains alone will solve everything.

But complexity is not an excuse for ritual surprise. The Lagos Resilience Strategy already recognises the need for coordinated preparation for acute shocks and chronic stresses. Government agencies receive forecasts and know many recurring flood locations. The challenge is turning knowledge into year-round execution: mapping risk, enforcing planning rules, expanding and maintaining drainage, keeping waterways clear, investing in pumping and retention where appropriate, communicating early warnings, and measuring whether interventions worked.

Residents also have responsibilities. Dumping waste in drains worsens flooding. Developers should not obstruct waterways. Communities should cooperate with maintenance and emergency plans. But citizen responsibility must not become an excuse for institutional neglect. Government exists partly to coordinate problems that individual households cannot solve alone.

An estate can build a private drain, but water does not respect the estate gate. One neighbourhood’s channel connects to another. One blocked collector can undermine many local interventions. This is precisely why public systems matter: some problems are collective by nature.

The gated-community illusion

Successful Africans often respond rationally to public failure; we construct private substitutes. We live in gated estates with boreholes, generators, guards and private waste arrangements. Our children attend schools with buses and their own power systems. We use private hospitals. We organise our movement around safe routes and predictable times. If we can afford it, we create a small functional country around ourselves.

But the walls are porous; the domestic worker travels on the failed road. The employee’s child attends the underperforming school; the supplier loses stock to flooding. The customer has less purchasing power because basic survival is expensive. The ambulance meets the same traffic. The food, water and air still come through a shared environment. When insecurity rises, private guards cannot replace the intelligence, legitimacy and scale of a functioning security system.

Even the psychological cost crosses the wall. It is difficult to live peacefully amid visible deprivation and constant institutional unpredictability. Wealth becomes defensive. People spend more time protecting what they have and less time imagining what they can build.

The saying about the rich person among a hundred poor people is therefore not an argument against personal wealth. It is an argument for shared prosperity. Your neighbours do not need to become dependent on your generosity. They need systems that allow them to become capable, secure and economically useful in their own right.

The greatest protection for wealth is not a taller fence. It is a society in which more people have something to protect and a credible path to progress.

We cannot outsource government to the least principled

Many principled and capable Africans avoid politics and public institutions for understandable reasons. They see corruption, patronage, public attacks and the possibility that years of work will be destroyed by one political decision. Business can appear cleaner: build a product, serve customers and measure the outcome.

But if good people permanently abandon government, the space does not remain empty. It is occupied by people who understand the power of public institutions and may use that power for themselves.

We cannot complain that unprincipled people control the system while treating public service as work beneath principled people.

Some of us must enter politics. Some must become judges, magistrates, lawyers and court administrators. Some must enter the military, police, intelligence and emergency services. Others must work in the civil service, electoral bodies, audit institutions, regulators, schools, hospitals, local governments and infrastructure agencies. Not everybody needs to contest an election. A state works through thousands of professional roles that rarely appear on campaign posters.

There will be losses. Some people will enter and become frustrated. Some will be removed. Some reforms will be reversed. Some principled candidates will lose elections to people with stronger political machinery. That is the nature of serious competition for power.

The answer is not to wait until the environment becomes clean enough for good people. The environment becomes cleaner because good people enter, organise, learn the system and remain long enough to change its incentives. We have to start.

Principle without political competence is not enough

Good intentions do not automatically create good government. A principled person who does not understand institutions, coalition building, budgets, law, public communication and implementation may enter office and accomplish very little.

This is why the call to public service must include preparation. Businesspeople entering government must learn that citizens are not employees and the state is not a private company. Public decisions require legality, due process and accountability to people who did not vote for the leader. Faith-driven people must understand that personal conviction should produce justice for everyone, including citizens who do not share their faith. Professionals must learn how political incentives shape what is possible without allowing those incentives to erase their principles.

We need people who can combine integrity with competence. They must know how to design policy, calculate costs, recruit teams, write rules, manage procurement, communicate trade-offs and build coalitions broad enough for reform to survive. They must know when to compromise on method without compromising the objective. They must also build institutions that do not depend on their continued presence.

One reforming governor or minister may demonstrate what is possible. But if the system can erase the work immediately after that person leaves, the reform was not yet institutional.

The aim is not merely to put a good person in power. It is to make good performance harder to reverse.

Put money where your mouth is

Those of us with resources have another responsibility. Politics and institution-building require money, expertise, time, networks and long-term support. If principled people enter public life without any serious support while corrupt networks are well financed, we should not be surprised by the result.

This does not mean secretly buying influence or replacing one godfather with another. It means funding lawful and transparent political participation, policy research, civic education, investigative journalism, strategic litigation, leadership development and institutions that monitor public performance.

Business leaders can second experienced professionals into public-interest projects, support data systems, help train administrators and fund nonpartisan organisations that make government more accountable. Professional associations can develop policy proposals before elections rather than appearing only after a crisis. Universities can build public-service programmes that combine ethics with execution. Churches and other faith communities can prepare members for public service instead of treating politics only as a subject for prayer.

Capital should build capacity, not purchase control; this distinction is important. A businessperson who funds a politician in exchange for contracts is reproducing the disease. A businessperson who supports transparent institutions, credible candidates and public-interest reforms is investing in the conditions under which everybody can prosper.

Start with one solvable public problem

The size of government failure can make participation feel hopeless. It helps to begin with a specific problem.

Choose one road corridor and publish its condition, traffic volume, maintenance history and repair timeline. Choose one flood-prone district and map the entire drainage system before the rains. Choose one court and reduce the age of pending commercial cases. Choose one local government and publish every procurement contract. Choose one public school network and measure whether children can actually read and calculate.

Then make the result visible. Successful reform creates political evidence. Citizens begin to see that competence is possible. Professionals learn what works; leaders elsewhere face pressure to copy it. Investors become willing to contribute because the programme has a record rather than only a promise.

Public systems improve through disciplined iteration, just like serious companies. Diagnose, design, implement, measure, correct and repeat. The difference is that the outcome belongs to everybody.

Prosperity must escape the compound

I want more Africans to become wealthy. I want us to build enormous companies, own assets, create technology and compete anywhere in the world. But private success should eventually increase our capacity to repair the public environment that made success unnecessarily difficult.

If all our best people use their intelligence only to escape broken systems, the systems will remain for our children. If all our capital is used only to purchase private substitutes, public institutions will remain starved of capability and scrutiny. If all our anger ends in private conversations, nothing acquires the force required to change.

We have to take the reins—not as a slogan and not all in the same way. One person will contest an election. Another will become a judge. Another will reform a security unit. Another will build public technology. Another will fund research. Another will organise citizens. Another will create an honest company that demonstrates what compliance and accountability look like.

Some will win, and some will lose; the work may take decades. But nation-building has always required people willing to begin projects whose full rewards may belong to another generation.

The rich person among a hundred poor people is poor because prosperity is not only what is inside the person’s account. Prosperity is also the quality of the systems through which life must pass.

It is the road between home and work; it is the drain outside the estate. It is the school producing future employees; it is the court enforcing a contract. It is the police officer responding in danger; it is the hospital available in an emergency. It is the neighbour who has a credible future.

Private excellence can protect us for a while; it cannot build the society alone. At some point, prosperity must escape the compound and become public capacity.