ÀRÍJẸ́ NÍ ÌDÍ ÌBÀJẸ́: The Economy of Dysfunction

There are Yorùbá expressions whose meanings grow darker the longer one lives. One of such is Àríjẹ́ ní ìdí ìbàjẹ́. I have known the expression for years, but lately, as I occupy the role of a public servant, I have begun hearing something larger inside it.

Ìbàjẹ́ is spoilage in Yorùbá; a deterioration, something gone bad.

Àríjẹ́ is the one who finds something to eat there.

So hidden inside the phrase is a disturbing social sequence:

Ìbàjẹ́ produces àríjẹ́. Àríjẹ́ develops an interest in the continuation of ìbàjẹ́.

Eventually, ìbàjẹ́ becomes difficult to repair because too many mouths have found food around it. The entire essence of my reflection has been perfectly captured here; what follows is merely an unnecessary elaboration.

What happens when this moves beyond individual behaviour and becomes a feature of society? What happens when things not working begin to work for people? When dysfunction itself acquires a societal function? That question has been recently following me around Nigeria.

A car breaks down on a Lagos bridge. Almost immediately, people materialise; Someone can push it. Someone knows a mechanic. Someone can help tow it. One area boy, whose function remains unclear, has appointed himself coordinator of the emergency. There can be tremendous generosity in such encounters, don’t get me wrong. But we also know the other possibility: if one person own no spoil, another person own no go better. Before long, your distress has become some people’s answered prayer for the day.

The area boys did not damage your car. They simply recognised economic possibility in its breakdown. Perhaps that is àríjẹ́ ní ìdí ìbàjẹ́ in miniature. Enlarge the stranded car and it begins to resemble a country where failure itself has acquired value. Just as Nigeria’s unreliable electricity produced an enormous economy of generators, diesel, inverters, batteries, solar installations, repairs and private power.

And we can see similar patterns all over: administrative opacity produces fixers. Insecurity produces private security. Failing public education expands private education. Scarcity produces middlemen. None of these people necessarily created the original failure. Many are providing valuable solutions to genuine problems.

That is precisely what makes the question interesting. A problem can acquire beneficiaries without its beneficiaries having caused it. And once dysfunction persists, adaptation develops roots. Jobs appear. Capital enters. Families depend upon it. Interests accumulate. The question is no longer merely: Why doesn’t this work? It becomes: Who now benefits from the fact that it doesn’t?

Every functioning system makes certain forms of expertise, access and hustle obsolete. Which means the difficulty of reform isn’t simply convincing people that functioning systems are desirable. It is confronting the interests that have accumulated around things not functioning.

There is an uncomfortable version of this in what contemporary Nigeria calls entrepreneurship. For decades, an oil-producing nation failed to make its state-owned refineries work reliably. Then an individual entrepreneur built a refinery capable of challenging our dependence on imported fuel.

We understandably celebrate the audacity. He recognised an enormous opportunity produced by institutional failure. But his intervention also threatens interests that have prospered around that failure for decades. Perhaps this is where the distinction becomes important: there are those who profit from solving dysfunction, and those whose prosperity depends on its continuation.

Is this not a significant part of our economic predicament? We have become exceptionally skilled at finding the hole. Building around the hole. Monetising the hole. Sometimes brilliantly. The point is not that enterprise should not profit from solving problems. At some point, we must become as interested in the system that quietly prevents the hole as in the genius who discovers a billion-dollar business fixing it. 

We have made an industry of intervention. Something collapses and suddenly Nigeria becomes energetic. Emergency allocation. Special intervention. Task Force. Reconstruction committee. Consultants. Something that could have been quietly maintained for twenty years deteriorates until its resurrection becomes an event. “The Bankers’ Committee has rescued the good old National Arts Theatre,” we say. 

There is visibility in rescue. Maintenance has little theatre. Nobody cuts a ribbon because the drainage was cleared before the rain. Nobody becomes a hero because the bridge did not collapse. No commissioning ceremony celebrates a roof that never leaked. We have become skilled at producing an economy of intervention where we need an economy of maintenance.

Sometimes, however, what we eat from dysfunction isn’t money. It is importance.

“Do you know who I am?”

In Nigeria, those six words contain an entire political theory: hierarchy, impunity, access, threat, entitlement. Six words that should carry little value in a functioning society. Here, they can open doors, and close them against those without a name to announce. Someone knows someone at the police headquarters. Someone can move the file. Someone has a cousin at the state house. Someone can make a call.

Dysfunction manufactures gatekeepers too. And the gatekeeper needs the gate. Make the procedure transparent, predictable and accessible and his special power disappears. This is why repair is difficult. Repair requires some of us to lose things. Not merely corrupt income, but special access, artificial importance, profitable scarcity, the prestige of being able to accomplish what should have happened ordinarily.

There is perhaps an older example in our political inheritance. At independence, Nigeria inherited a colonial architecture largely designed around extraction, administration and control. But what became of that architecture in the hands of our own political and elite classes? Colonialism formally ended, yet coloniality persists, partly because inherited structures have continued to serve those entrusted with transforming them. 

The privileges of the colonial administrator became available to the nationalist elite. The machinery of oppression remained, nationalist leaders became the new beneficiaries, even while celebrating liberation from its former owners. Is this not another expression of àríjẹ́ ní ìdí ìbàjẹ́? The question is no longer simply who built the gate, but who inherited it? Who now benefits from controlling access to it? Who has acquired wealth, status and relevance from keeping it standing?

Now, let us turn the expression towards ourselves. It is easier to locate the àríjẹ́ elsewhere: the politician, the contractor, the civil servant, the area boys. But this reflection becomes more useful when it turns around. A weak currency hurts millions but can increase the purchasing power of someone earning in dollars. A failing school system increases the advantage of those who can buy excellent private education. Institutional opacity increases the value of our connections.

To adapt to dysfunction is not necessarily to desire it. Protecting our families within these conditions is perfectly understandable. But adaptation can still produce advantages we become reluctant to surrender. There is a difference between culpability and implicatedness.

Culpability asks: Who broke this?

Implicatedness asks: What advantage do I possess because it remains broken?

That is a harder question. What becomes less valuable about me if things begin working for everybody?

Fortunately, Yorùbá thought does not leave us only with the diagnosis. There is another ethic: Má jẹ́ ó bàjẹ́. Don’t let it spoil. From this comes the figure of the Májẹ̀óbàjẹ́: the person who refuses to allow what has been entrusted to them to deteriorate. Perhaps Nigeria needs to make this person culturally admirable again.

The àríjẹ́ finds opportunity after deterioration. The hero arrives after catastrophe. The Májẹ̀óbàjẹ́ is less dramatic. Under their watch, the catastrophe simply doesn’t happen. The engineer that replaces the failing component. The curator who protects the collection. The public servant that simplifies the procedure. The manager that leaves the institution stronger than they inherited it.

No miracle. No intervention. Things simply work.

What if this became one of our highest compliments? Májẹ̀óbàjẹ́ ni. Things do not spoil in their care.

Then another Yorùbá saying completes the thought: Àti kékeré la ti ń pẹ̀ka ìrókò, torí tó bá dàgbà tán, ẹbọ ló máa gbà. Attend to the ìrókò while it is still small. Once it has grown, it will require sacrifice.

Fix the small things early, because neglect compounds. What requires attention eventually requires intervention. What requires intervention becomes an emergency. And emergency demands sacrifice. By then, somebody will probably have discovered a business in selling the sacrificial lambs.

The deeper task, then, is not to eliminate àríjẹ́. People must eat. Ambition must have somewhere to go. Enterprise must find opportunity. The question is what kind of society we have organised that appetite around. Can we make maintenance more valuable than collapse, prevention more rewarding than intervention, competence more profitable than scarcity?

There should be more to gain from keeping the bridge standing than rebuilding it after it falls; more prestige in an institution that quietly works than in the hero who arrives to rescue it, because a society eventually becomes what it rewards. Perhaps this is where Má jẹ́ ó bàjẹ́ becomes more than an old Yorùbá ethic. Let prosperity gather around what endures, what is cared for, what remains whole. Because once enough people learn to eat from decay, decay itself acquires defenders.

And that is where the expression finally turns towards us. We say we want Nigeria to work. Most of us mean it. Yet somewhere inside the Nigeria that does not work, many of us have also found something that works for us: An advantage. An access. A business. A connection. A relevance. So perhaps the question Àríjẹ́ ní ìdí ìbàjẹ́ ultimately leaves at our door is a more uncomfortable one: What would you have to lose if everything began to work as it should?