A traffic light turns red at a busy Nigerian intersection. Cars slow briefly, then speed ahead anyway. Some stop. Many don’t.

There is no confusion about what the light means. Red means stop. There is only uncertainty about whether it truly matters. This little moment, which happens regularly on Nigerian roads, reveals something wrong with the larger system.

Nigeria does not suffer from an absence of institutions. We suffer from institutions that exist without the metamorphosis needed for real development. Governance, law, bureaucracy, democracy, the police and others did not emerge organically from Nigerian or broader African societies, at least not in the way they are performed today. They were inherited. In Europe, these systems evolved through centuries of conflict, revolution, failure and reform. They were not ideals copied from elsewhere; they were solutions developed internally from an understanding of their own problems.

Nigeria inherited the form of these institutions without the historical struggle that gave them meaning and legitimacy. As a result, many systems operate as caricatures: elections, laws, the police, the legislature, the judiciary, the executive, even the education system. It is all borrowed, it is all copied, and it is all subpar compared with Western practice. The concepts exist, but the shared understanding of why they are necessary and what they are truly for remains thin.

At independence, Nigerian leaders had a rare opportunity to interrogate this inheritance and adapt the systems to local culture, diversity and the political psychology of Nigerians. Instead, most colonial structures were preserved wholesale, with minimal redesign. I believe this is a result of how Nigeria gained her independence, which was through negotiation, unlike Asian counterparts such as China, Vietnam and Indonesia, which broke the chains of colonialism through violence and revolution. The way a country won its independence, in other words, shaped how deeply it redesigned its institutions.

The result is a mismatch between institutional form and social substance. The solutions are external, not owned. Like the traffic light, an institution becomes a symbol of order or “development” rather than a working mechanism, an emblem put up to appear modern. Because it was not born of local trial and adaptation, it is treated as decoration, not as a covenant among a people solving their own problems.

This is why institutions here often feel weak. It is not for lack of intelligence or capacity. It is because borrowed systems were never fully made ours. Institutions function best when they emerge from lived experience and collective learning.

Making our institutions our own

The opportunity missed at independence can still be taken, but not by waiting for legitimacy to appear on its own. It has to be built deliberately.

First, the constitution review process of the National Assembly should become a genuine national conversation rather than an exercise among lawmakers. Public hearings should be held in every state and in local languages, and the committees should publish what citizens asked for and what they did with it. People obey rules more readily when they can see their own hand in making them.

Second, rules must be enforced the same way every time and for everyone. The red light is ignored because running it rarely carries a consequence. State traffic agencies, the police and the courts must apply penalties consistently, whatever the status of the offender, and publish their enforcement records. Legitimacy grows when citizens see that a rule binds the powerful as surely as it binds the ordinary motorist.

Third, institutions should be adapted to the communities they serve. Federal and state governments should allow local trial and adaptation: community-based policing designed with traditional and community leaders, and customary and alternative dispute resolution properly linked to the formal courts. The arrangements that work should be scaled up and those that fail dropped, so that our systems grow out of Nigerian experience rather than being copied whole.

Fourth, schools should teach why institutions exist, not only what they are. Ministries of education should make civic education practical, so that young people learn what the courts, the legislature and the police are for, and how citizens can hold them to account.

Finally, public institutions should answer to the people regularly. Agencies should publish their performance and hold open sessions where citizens can question them. An institution that must explain itself to the public slowly becomes one the public believes in.

The traffic light will only mean “stop” when Nigerians believe it was put there for them, and when everyone who runs it faces the same consequence.