Trust is the everyday currency of democratic life. When it drains away, institutions keep their seals but lose their weight. The recent Chatham House/NBS findings are not just gloomy numbers; they describe a social contract under strain. Almost half of Nigerians say they “greatly distrust” the police, and roughly a third deeply distrust the presidency and the Federal Government.
Courts, local councils, and state politicians also score poorly. Beneath these figures sits a paradox: many believe power matters more than honesty in their communities, yet most still feel bad when others are exploited. Nigerians have not lost their moral compass; they have lost confidence that integrity is rewarded.
Trust is the quiet architecture that holds a nation together. When it erodes—as it has in Nigeria—it does not merely bruise reputations; it hollows out institutions meant to protect and stabilise society. Courts become venues of suspicion rather than justice, the police a source of fear rather than security, and ministries echo chambers rather than engines of policy. I have warned about this drift before. The message is simple: governance cannot function effectively without trust.
This has profound consequences for the presidency. In every constitutional democracy, the presidency is more than an office; it is a symbol of sovereignty, the point at which authority becomes legitimate in the eyes of citizens. When trust in that symbol falls, the state struggles to secure compliance, enforce laws, and maintain order. The distance between decree and delivery widens; the cost of governing climbs; every reform meets friction, suspicion, and delay. Formal power may remain, but the informal consent on which power thrives becomes fragile. People then move outside the state—toward private security, informal payments, and parallel services.
Equally troubling is the near-consensus that political and economic power now outrank honesty and constitutionally guaranteed rights. When power eclipses principle, democracy becomes performance. Citizens recalibrate expectations downward, treating impunity as usual and corruption as inevitable. Social cohesion frays as people retreat into coping strategies—such as ethnic solidarities, informal economies, and transactional shortcuts—because public institutions often feel distant, arbitrary, or predatory.
The economy pays a price. Corruption is not just a moral wrong; it is an efficiency tax that compounds daily. It diverts resources from classrooms, clinics, and roads, weakens the rule of law, and raises the cost of doing business. Nigeria’s headline GDP flatters, but GDP per capita tells a truer story about household prosperity. It is no coincidence that a country battling service-delivery gaps also records stubborn poverty. When citizens see budgets without outcomes, they disengage. Ask them to broaden the tax net, and they pose a fair question: where does the money go? Trust and tax morale are twins—you cannot raise one while neglecting the other.
The trust deficit did not appear overnight. Nigerians have endured a quarter-century of anti-corruption campaigns whose headlines outpaced results. Party loyalty has too often trumped public interest; selective enforcement has replaced even-handed justice; and institutional incentives have rewarded survival within a broken system rather than reform. Reform fatigue follows. People hear the right words but wait for proof before they believe. Each unfulfilled pledge raises the “cost of honesty”—the risk that playing by the rules leaves one poorer or excluded—while lowering the “cost of corruption,” which seems ordinary, profitable, and rarely punished.
The divide between declarations and reality widens when officials claim that corruption has been vanquished, while everyday experience and independent data suggest otherwise. Leaders rebuild trust not by insisting that present hardship will yield future benefits, but by showing the link between income and outcomes and inviting external verification. Humility is not weakness; it is the precondition for collective effort. A candid admission—“we are falling short here; here is what we will do by set dates; and here is how you can check”—earns more trust than triumphalist claims that do not match reality.
Yet the Chatham House work also surfaces an asset: civic readiness. Nearly half of the respondents believe their communities are willing to monitor public spending on development projects. This is not trivial. Countries that turned the tide on corruption did not rely on elite willpower alone; they built citizen-centred systems that make wrongdoing harder, costlier, and riskier. Nigeria’s opportunity lies in shifting from exhortation to architecture: empowering communities to track projects, publish contracts, and create channels where complaints trigger visible action.
What would a credible reset look like? First, an acknowledgement from the presidency that trust is low and rebuilding it is a national priority. This is not about blame; it is about alignment. A short, time-bound action plan should follow, with dates, owners, and public milestones. In policing, establish an independent complaints mechanism with power to investigate and publish outcomes; roll out body-worn cameras in high-risk areas with clear usage rules; and issue annual integrity reports that track complaints by type and outcome, stop-and-search data by location, and disciplinary actions taken. Train for procedural justice—the evidence shows people comply when processes are transparent and respectful, even when outcomes are adverse—and pair this with officer protections and incentives so that good policing is safer and more rewarding than rent-seeking.
Procurement should become radically open. Make open contracting the default for all MDAs and publish beneficial ownership information before any major award. Where ownership is hidden, do not proceed. Build live dashboards of project progress and payments that citizens can view and interact with.
In whistleblowing, move beyond slogans: enact robust protections, guarantee anonymity, and publish statistics on tips, investigations, and sanctions to prove the system bites. In justice, create court-performance dashboards with case-time standards and reasons for delay; expand small-claims courts and ADR to make justice faster and cheaper. On taxes, ring-fence portions of local revenue for visible amenities—streetlights, waste collection, primary care—and report quarterly on delivery.
Participatory budgeting pilots can show communities how their naira becomes services.
If wrongdoing becomes reliably expensive, justice measurably quicker and fairer, and taxes visibly become services, trust will follow—not as sentiment, but as sense. That is the path out of cynicism: a state that performs in ways citizens can see, test, and believe. When trust begins to return, it will be sturdier than optimism—confidence earned by institutions that work, without drama, in the ordinary rhythm of Nigerian life. The task ahead is to make integrity cheaper than impunity and service more rewarding than cynicism—so our institutions function not as fortresses of power, but as instruments of the common good.
The post Receipts, not rhetoric: A trust reset for Nigeria, by Dakuku Peterside appeared first on Vanguard News.
