The Things We Should Never Have Had to Pray For

by: Similoluwa Ifedayo

Nigeria is a deeply religious country. We pray about almost everything. We pray before we travel, before examinations, before interviews, before medical procedures and before starting new businesses. We pray for our families, our loved ones, our health, our marriages and our futures. I pray too. I believe in prayer, and I believe God is interested in the details of our lives.

But sometimes I think about the things Nigerians pray for and wonder what they tell us about the country we have built.

We pray that the electricity stays on long enough to finish an assignment. We pray that the Internet holds during an interview or meeting. We pray that the traffic will not make us late even after leaving home early because of bad roads. We pray that the public hospital has a doctor available when we arrive and that the nurses will treat us with kindness. We pray that the food we buy is safe and that the skincare products we use are genuine. We pray that the person driving us home is careful. We pray that the police officer who stops us on the road is simply going to do his job and not hurt us. We pray before travelling because we want to return home.

These prayers are so ordinary that we hardly notice how strange they are.

Of course, every country has its problems. Every society has things that can go wrong. The question is what happens when uncertainty becomes such a normal part of daily life that people begin building their entire lives around it.

You do not simply leave for work. You leave early because you have calculated the traffic. You do not simply work from home. You first think about electricity, the Internet and whether your laptop will survive the day. You do not simply go to the public hospital. You wonder whether the doctor will be available, whether the queue will be manageable and whether you can afford whatever happens next. You do not simply travel. You think about the road, the vehicle, the time, the route and whether you will return safely.

You learn to make contingency plans for ordinary life. And when the contingency plans fail, you pray.

I find this both funny and deeply unsettling. Nigerians are genuinely funny people. Sometimes I think we must entertain God and the angels because of the things we have learnt to say with complete seriousness: “God, please let there be light.” “God, please let the network work.” “God, please reduce this traffic.”

But the joke stops being funny when you realise how much is sitting underneath it.

The problem is not that we pray. The problem is that some of the things we pray for are symptoms of systems that should work without requiring extraordinary intervention from either God or the citizen.

Take electricity. In a 2024 Afrobarometer survey, 75% of Nigerians said their households were connected to the national grid, but only 13% said they had electricity that worked most or all of the time. Among Nigerians experiencing high levels of lived poverty, the figure was 9%.

That difference matters. Access is not the same as reliability. And reliability is not a luxury when you are trying to study, run a business, work remotely, preserve food, operate a hospital or build a career.

The same is true of the Internet. Nigeria’s digital economy has created opportunities that would have been difficult to imagine a generation ago. A young Nigerian can work for a company in another country without leaving Lagos. A student can take a course from a university thousands of miles away. A writer can publish for an international audience from her bedroom. A designer can find clients on another continent.

But the opportunity only exists if the infrastructure allows you to participate.

For someone writing a report, attending an interview or delivering work online, a failed connection is not a technical inconvenience. It can be the difference between participating and not participating. Between getting the opportunity and losing it.

This is where I begin to think about the young Nigerians we keep asking to dream bigger. They are told to learn digital skills. Start businesses. Work remotely. Become entrepreneurs. Compete internationally. Create jobs. Build solutions. Be innovative. Become the leaders of tomorrow.

All of that is fair. But the cost of the environment in which that ambition has to operate is something we do not talk about enough.

If one young person spends two hours commuting because of inadequate transport infrastructure and another spends thirty minutes getting to work, they do not arrive with the same amount of time or energy. If one person can study in a room with reliable electricity while another spends the evening looking for somewhere to charge a laptop, they do not have the same conditions for learning. If one person can apply for an international opportunity from a stable internet connection while another has to worry about whether the network will survive the application, they are not operating with the same margin for error.

Talent may be equally distributed. Opportunity is not. And neither is the cost of accessing it.

This is why I sometimes find the Nigerian celebration of resilience complicated.

I love Nigerian resilience. I have seen it in people around me all my life. Nigerians build businesses in difficult economies. They create communities when institutions fail them. They study through power cuts. They find another route when the first one closes. They start again after things go wrong.

It is empowering. However, there is a difference between admiring resilience and designing a society that requires it. Resilience should help people survive the unexpected. It should not be the price of admission to ordinary life. A functioning society should not require extraordinary resourcefulness for basic things.

We should not need to be unusually connected, unusually wealthy, unusually lucky or unusually determined simply to have a fair chance at a decent life.

The consequences are larger than individual inconvenience. When we talk about Nigeria’s future, we often talk about what young people need to do. Be educated. Learn a skill. Work harder. Start something. Be innovative. Be resilient.

We need to talk about what the country needs to make possible, because there is a limit to how much personal development can compensate for institutional failure.

There is a point at which “learn a skill” cannot solve the cost of electricity. There is a point at which “work harder” cannot solve unemployment. There is a point at which “be resilient” cannot fix a road. There is a point at which networking cannot replace an institution. Also, there is a point at which prayer cannot be asked to carry the responsibilities of public systems.

This is not an argument against faith. If anything, it is an argument for taking both faith and citizenship seriously.

I can believe that God provides and still expect a functioning hospital. I can pray for protection and still expect safe roads. I can pray for favour and still expect a fair opportunity. I can trust God with my future and still ask my government to do its job.

These things do not contradict each other. What worries me is how much potential Nigeria may be losing in ways we cannot easily measure.

Sometimes it is the student who stops applying because the cost of getting to the interview is too much. It is the graduate who takes a job far below her ability because she needs to eat. It is the entrepreneur who never starts because the cost of keeping the business alive is too high. It is the researcher who cannot attend the conference. It is the writer who has something to say but cannot consistently afford the conditions required to say it.

These people rarely become statistics.

We tend to notice the ones who make it. We celebrate the person who built the company, won the scholarship, got the international fellowship, became the professional, travelled the world or created the organisation.

We do not always ask how many people with comparable ability never got the chance to become those things. That is the part that stays with me.

A country does not only lose people when they die or leave. It also loses when people become less than they could have been because too much of their energy went into navigating obstacles that should not have existed.

I wonder what would happen if we had fewer odds to overcome.

What would Nigerians build if they did not have to spend so much energy working around their country? What would young people become if survival did not consume so much of their imagination? What opportunities would we create if our institutions worked well enough that citizens could spend more of their energy creating rather than compensating?

The question we should be asking is not how much more resilient Nigerians can become. It should be how much more Nigerians could become if they did not have to be so resilient in the first place.

We sometimes talk about struggle as though it is what makes people exceptional. I think some people are exceptional despite having to struggle. I would rather live in a country where fewer people have to discover what they are capable of under pressure, where more people have the stability to take risks, make mistakes, try again and build something simply because they want to see it exist.