There is a peculiar comfort Nigerians take in assigning blame. Insecurity is “a Northern problem.” Environmental degradation is “a Niger Delta problem.” Economic hardship is “a government problem.”
Each crisis gets filed neatly into someone else’s box, someone else’s region, someone else’s failure. It is a comforting habit, and it is precisely why, after decades of policies, summits, task forces, and reforms, the same crises keep resurfacing in new clothes.
In 1973, urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber gave a name to problems that resist this kind of neat filing: wicked problems.
Unlike “tame” problems, a bridge to build, an equation to solve, wicked problems have no clear definition, no stopping rule, no test for whether a solution has actually worked, and no “right” answer, only better or worse ones.
Every attempted solution has consequences that ripple outward, often creating new problems.
And critically: every wicked problem is a symptom of another problem.
Nigeria’s social, environmental, and security crises are wicked problems in the truest sense. Until we accept this, and stop treating them as isolated technical failures to be patched by the next committee, we will keep circling the same fire without ever putting it out.
The Symptoms We Keep Treating as Diseases
Consider the interconnected web:
Insecurity in the North-West and North-Central is routinely described as a “banditry problem” or a “terrorism problem.”
But banditry feeds on the same soil as farmer-herder conflict, which itself is inflamed by desertification, shrinking grazing land, and a Lake Chad that has lost most of its surface area in two generations.
Displaced pastoralists become recruits for armed groups not because they are inherently violent, but because livelihoods collapsed and no institution filled the vacuum.
Environmental degradation, desert encroachment in Sokoto, Katsina, and Jigawa; erosion gullies swallowing towns in the South-East; oil spills poisoning the Niger Delta’s creeks; flooding that displaces millions annually, is treated as an “environment ministry problem,” separate from the economy, separate from security.
Yet it is the quiet engine behind rural-urban migration, youth unemployment, and the resource competition that hardens into conflict.
Economic hardship is framed as a “fiscal problem,” solvable by subsidy removal or exchange rate unification. But when hardship meets a generation with no jobs, in a region stripped of arable land, in a security vacuum with easy access to arms, it does not stay an economic statistic. It becomes recruitment material.
None of these is the root cause. Each is both a symptom and a cause of the others. This is not a chain, it is a web. And webs cannot be cut with a single knife.
Why Nigeria’s Usual Solutions Fail
Rittel and Webber’s framework explains, almost too precisely, why so many well-funded Nigerian interventions underdeliver:
No clear definition. We rarely agree on what the problem even is before drafting a policy.
Is farmer-herder conflict a security issue, a land-tenure issue, or a climate issue? Depending on who is defining it, the response, military deployment, grazing reserve gazettement, or climate adaptation, will look completely different, and stakeholders will keep talking past each other.
No “right to be wrong.” Politically, admitting a policy failed is treated as weakness rather than as the normal cost of tackling something genuinely hard. So failed interventions are rebranded and relaunched rather than honestly diagnosed.
Solutions limited by worldview. A security-first mindset sees only enemies to defeat. An economist sees only markets to fix. An environmentalist sees only ecosystems to restore. Each is partially right and dangerously incomplete alone.
“One-shot” consequences. Heavy-handed security operations without parallel livelihood support don’t just fail to solve insecurity, they can radicalize communities further, making the next round of violence worse.
This is not an argument for paralysis. It is an argument for honesty about the nature of the problem, which is the only honest starting point for a real solution.
The Case for Unified, Unbiased Thinking
Wicked problems cannot be solved by any single actor, sector, or region working in isolation, and they certainly cannot be solved by a country fractured along ethnic, religious, and regional fault lines, each faction convinced the crisis is someone else’s fault and someone else’s fix.
This is where patriotism earns its keep, not as a slogan for independence day, but as a working method.
Patriotism, understood properly, is not blind loyalty to a government or uncritical pride in a flag. It is the recognition that 200 million people sharing one geography share one fate.
The herder in Zamfara and the farmer in Enugu and the fisherman in Bayelsa are not competitors in a zero-sum contest for a shrinking pie, they are all standing on ground reshaped by the same climate stress, the same governance gaps, the same historical neglect.
A unified way of thinking means:
Refusing single-lens diagnosis. No crisis in Nigeria today is purely security, purely economic, or purely environmental.
Every serious response team, at federal, state, and local level, needs security, environmental, economic, and social actors in the same room, from the design stage, not bolted on after the fact.
Treating regions as partners, not culprits. The North’s desertification is not a “Northern problem” the South can ignore; it drives migration patterns that reshape the whole country.
The South’s oil pollution is not a “Niger Delta problem”; it is a preview of the environmental governance failures that will visit every region as climate stress intensifies. What happens in one zone does not stay in that zone.
Accepting incremental, honest progress over performative “final solutions.” Wicked problems have no finish line, no moment of “solved.”
Development partners, government officials, and citizens alike need to measure success not by a single policy’s total victory, but by whether the trajectory, vegetation cover, displacement numbers, conflict incidents, youth employment, is genuinely bending in the right direction, year on year.
Building institutions that outlast administrations. Because there is no stopping rule, solutions must be embedded in durable frameworks, climate change laws, MRV systems, subnational governance structures, not dependent on the political will of whichever government is currently in office.
A Call to the Fire That Should Unite Us
There is a fire Nigeria needs, not the fire of grievance, not the fire that burns markets and displaces villages, but the fire of shared purpose.
The fire that recognizes that a nation this size, this diverse, and this endowed cannot afford the luxury of fractured thinking in the face of problems that respect no state boundary and no ethnic line.
Climate stress will not check a person’s religion before drying up their well. Insecurity does not stop at a state border because the neighbouring governor belongs to a different party. Economic hardship does not spare a household because it voted differently.
If Nigeria’s challenges are wicked, and they are, then the only response worthy of them is a citizenry and a leadership willing to think together, disagree honestly, and act as one country solving one interconnected set of problems, rather than 36 states and countless communities each nursing their own fragment of the crisis in isolation.
That is not naïve idealism. It is, in fact, the only realistic strategy a wicked problem leaves us.
The alternative, continuing to treat symptoms as if they were diseases, and neighbours as if they were enemies, is a fire that consumes rather than unites.
Nigeria does not lack the intelligence, the institutions, or the resources to turn this around. What it needs, urgently, is the collective will to see its problems whole, and to face them as one people.
Written by Umar Saleh Anka, Director of Climate Change, Kano State Ministry of Water Resources, Environment and Climate Change
Adapted framework: Rittel, H.W.J. and Webber, M.M. (1973). “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences, June 1973.
