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What Nigeria’s public spaces say about the future 20 Oct 2026

Under successive Nigerian administrations since 1999, budgetary allocations to capital expenditure have averaged more than 30%. A substantial share of these funds goes directly to infrastructure. Despite competing fiscal needs, including high recurrent expenditure and heavy debt service obligations, these capital budgets are ostensibly intended to signal that the government is building for the future. In 2026, however, that future remains as inscrutable and elusive as it was in 1999.

This is a profoundly disturbing reality. Not only does Nigeria continue to endure a massive infrastructure gap, but its infrastructure spending has also driven its soaring public debt. While future revenues – and even new loans – are consumed by servicing existing debt, the country has failed to maximise the economic and social returns on its built public amenities.

Consequently, policy discussions often centre on whether the government should prioritise completing existing infrastructure rather than commissioning new projects. This line of thinking is prompted by the uncompleted, abandoned, or decrepit monuments that litter the national landscape. However, focusing solely on project completion rates overlooks a deeper crisis: the acute under-realisation of the broader, transformative benefits of public infrastructure.

The True Purpose of Infrastructure

Transport infrastructure, such as roads, railways, and airports, currently absorbs a disproportionate share of Nigeria’s capital allocations. Nominally, these projects enable mobility for economic or social purposes. Enhanced mobility drives economic productivity by connecting citizens to jobs, markets, and broader livelihood opportunities. It also attracts private investment and improves overall quality of life.

However, the true value of infrastructure extends far beyond logistics. When a government consistently invests in high-quality, accessible public spaces, it signals institutional confidence in a buoyant future. Such projects require rigorous planning and long-term maintenance, grounded in the belief that citizens will use them safely for decades to come.

Furthermore, infrastructure reflects national ambition. Conversely, it reveals the narrow, exclusionary boundaries of that ambition when projects are poorly integrated, highly concentrated, and elitist. Historically, great societies are remembered not only for their roads and bridges but also for the democratic quality of their shared civic spaces.

Parks, transport hubs, public libraries, pedestrian walkways, waterfronts, and museums do more than provide basic amenities; they actively shape human behaviour. They instil structural discipline – encouraging citizens to queue, walk, commute efficiently, exercise, and share public spaces. In this sense, public spaces function as vital social infrastructure.

When well-designed, they foster civil order, institutional trust, and social cohesion. A well-engineered transport hub reduces urban chaos. Safe, spacious pavements encourage pedestrian discipline. Public parks provide recreation that might otherwise spill into dangerous or unregulated spaces. Ultimately, these amenities equalise the citizen experience. When individuals from vastly different socio-economic backgrounds use the same park, ride the same train system, or study in the same library, they cultivate a shared sense of community and mutual respect.

Public spaces are also the ultimate measure of institutional competence. A clean, functional, and meticulously maintained public realm signals proactive governance. Citizens rarely judge a government's effectiveness by its technical policy documents; they judge it by the quality of the physical environments they encounter every day.

From Vision to Decay

A comprehensive understanding of public space was evident in the late colonial administration and the immediate post-independence era. In 1859, the British colonial administration established the Lagos Race Course for sports and civic gatherings. The facility was later rehabilitated for the 1960 Independence celebrations and, twelve years later, reconstructed as the iconic Tafawa Balewa Square – a historic, 50,000-capacity ceremonial arena and commercial hub.

Similarly, the National Arts Theatre – renamed in 2024 as the Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts – was commissioned in 1976 on the conviction that national culture merited monumental public investment. Following the founding of the University of Ibadan in 1948, the University of Lagos, Ahmadu Bello University, and the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) were established between 1960 and 1962. These campuses featured expansive public spaces, world-class libraries, deliberate landscaping, and majestic civic architecture. They reflected a grand expectation that Nigeria would evolve into a leading global knowledge economy.

In that bygone era, Nigeria used its public spaces to actively imagine a better future. Six decades later, the country has not only failed to replicate these architectural and institutional masterpieces but has also lost the capacity to maintain them or to realise the future they projected. The same tragic decay affects the interstate highways built decades ago, many of which are now virtually impassable.

Today, Nigeria has drifted from these historic benchmarks in at least six ways:

Political Self-Interest: New mega-projects, such as the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road, are often conceived and rushed through primarily to serve the immediate political interests of incumbent administrations.

Personalisation of Monuments: Renovated public landmarks are increasingly used for political flattery. The National Arts Theatre in Lagos was renamed after a major government ally, and the Abuja International Conference Centre was rechristened the Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre in 2025.

Symbolism of Waste: The national stadiums in Lagos and Abuja stand as derelict monuments to systemic neglect and a broken maintenance culture. Their ongoing decay ironically suggests a shortage of prominent political figures after whom they might be renamed to trigger renovation.

Declining Technical Capacity: The abysmal state of public roads and bridges reveals a severe regression in national engineering capacity. These corridors have become death traps. Poorly executed patches require constant rework, creating artificial, recurring gridlock. A prime example is the Kara Bridge on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, where a new round of expansion-joint repairs triggered severe, paralysing traffic gridlock at the time of writing.

Degradation of Learning Spaces: Modern Nigerian public schools and libraries no longer meet the rigorous standards of the immediate post-independence era. Legacy facilities are left to crumble as national investment in education falls dangerously short of required benchmarks.

Environmental Degradation: Each major new infrastructure development actively erodes environmental sustainability rather than advancing it. For example, construction on the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road allegedly began without an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report. Similarly, in mid-August 2026, severe erosion and flash floods ravaged Abuja after heavy rains, prompting the Federal Capital Territory Administration to carry out aggressive, reactive demolitions of structures built illegally on natural waterways and green belts.

Arguably, the governing philosophy of the Nigerian state has transmogrified: it has shifted from building for a collective, enduring future to serving the transactional interests of a ruling elite. Yet a society's public infrastructure remains the physical expression of its soul and vision. When a government genuinely builds for tomorrow, public spaces become functional, inclusive, resilient, and green. But when governance serves immediate political appetites, public infrastructure inevitably becomes purely symbolic, deeply personalised, dangerously neglected, and entirely disconnected from the people's needs.

Visual Landscape of Neglect

As Nigeria continues to pour vast capital into infrastructure, growing evidence suggests that its project culture has shifted fundamentally away from long-term civic transformation towards mere political visibility. Many new projects fail to reflect the citizenry's actual economic priorities, even as they coexist with heavily neglected state and national assets. Consequently, the country's physical landscape fails to mirror the ambitions of a society preparing for a prosperous future.

A newly completed road, bridge, school, or public building should simultaneously convey multiple institutional virtues: competence, care, permanence, confidence, and progress. Yet in Nigeria, public works routinely lose this symbolic power. Both at commissioning and for years afterwards, the sites surrounding these projects remain littered with broken concrete, discarded machinery, rusting equipment, exposed topsoil, temporary fencing, and construction debris. Because many projects appear to stop abruptly at the engineering phase, the surrounding public realm is left utterly abandoned. As a result, infrastructure explicitly intended to symbolise modernisation ends up reinforcing deeply entrenched perceptions of civic disorder.

Urban theorists often describe the "public realm" as a direct indicator of state capability. In Nigeria, the visual chaos of the project landscape signals state incompetence. A substantial body of urban planning literature and environmental psychology confirms a bidirectional, mutually reinforcing relationship between public spaces and the people who occupy them. People shape spaces, but spaces also shape people.

This dynamic is particularly noteworthy because public discussions of sanitation and lawlessness in Nigeria often assume that disorderly environments are caused solely by disorderly citizens. While citizen behaviour is undoubtedly a factor, disorderly environments actively encourage disorderly behaviour.

If a brand-new bridge is ringed by rubble, broken pavements, abandoned building materials, overgrown weeds, and unmanaged waste, it sends a powerful subliminal message: standards here are low. This is a central concern regarding the recently rehabilitated legacy asset, the Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts (formerly the National Arts Theatre). While the building itself is a modern facility, it sits within a largely unsightly and chaotic environment. Visitors approaching the theatre are immediately confronted with the visual and structural blight of its surroundings.

Intuitively, when an environment is pristine and intentional, people treat it with respect and consciously self-regulate to preserve it. Conversely, when a space is visibly unkempt, users feel psychologically justified in further degrading it. But when a public realm is beautifully landscaped, clean, well-lit, and visibly maintained, citizens become highly reluctant to violate those standards.

This aligns with the "broken windows" hypothesis in urban studies. The core of this theory is not that a broken window directly triggers violent crime; rather, visible signs of structural neglect signal that rules are weakly enforced and that no institutional authority cares about the environment. Consequently, littered public spaces inevitably attract more litter. A neglected building invites further vandalism. A poorly maintained road corridor quickly becomes a magnet for illegal signage, illicit waste dumping, and commercial encroachment.

Infrastructure as Civic Education

The crisis of learning in Nigeria extends far beyond the four walls of its underfunded classrooms; it also encompasses the negative lessons about citizenship taught daily in decrepit, chaotic public spaces. Citizens internalise profound civic values from their built environment. They learn orderly behaviours – such as queuing, respecting public ordinances, and maintaining environmental cleanliness – when the public realm serves as a silent teacher.

Singapore is perhaps the global benchmark for this phenomenon. While many outsiders mistakenly attribute the cleanliness of its public spaces solely to aggressive legal penalties and a draconian "nanny state," the reality is that Singapore's physical environment consistently signals order, institutional care, and meticulous maintenance.

In this regard, infrastructure must never be viewed solely through the narrow lens of transport mechanics or raw economic utility. It is a powerful tool for shaping civic education and human behaviour. A clean, orderly, and aesthetically pleasing public environment quietly signals to citizens the standards their society expects of them.

Conversely, Nigeria's chaotic public spaces are not merely engineering failures; they reflect a profound cultural and psychological crisis. When citizens repeatedly encounter unfinished, cluttered, and poorly maintained public assets, they internalise a cynical view of their nation as permanently incomplete and structurally broken. By contrast, clean, attractive, and orderly public spaces signal that progress is achievable, that state institutions are capable, and that citizens are expected to cherish and protect their shared heritage.

Envisioning the Future

If public spaces are indeed the physical expression of a nation's future, Nigeria's current infrastructure landscape offers a troubling prognosis. That future appears, at best, deeply conflicted. New mega-projects rise awkwardly, while legacy assets decay. Colossal sums are spent, yet systemic disorder persists. Projects are loudly commissioned but left structurally incomplete. As more projects roll out, a haunting concern grows: does what we are building truly reflect the orderly, sustainable, and ambitious future that genuine national development is meant to create?

Development is not merely the mathematical addition of new public assets. It concerns how those assets produce and sustain public order. A society develops when its physical environment becomes progressively more organised, functional, legible, and pleasant to inhabit. By this metric, the persistence of chaos around public infrastructure projects in Nigeria raises urgent questions about the very nature of the development model being pursued.

The country must urgently optimise the visual and psychological impact of its infrastructure investments. The definition of "project completion" must be expanded legally and operationally. A project should not be certified as finished until all temporary materials are removed and the site has undergone rigorous landscaping, painting, paving, installation of standardised signage, integration of street furniture, and, where necessary, installation of modern lighting.

While the economic impact of the built environment is easily quantified, the transformational social and psychological impact of our public spaces must be deliberately and aggressively cultivated. If Nigeria is to become modern, its public spaces must begin to look like destinations worth arriving at.

Jide Akintunde is the Managing Editor of Financial Nigeria magazine and the author of "Youth Breed: How Generations of Nigerian Youth Impact Their Country".