The Rot We Have Learned to Live With

The water has stopped running, the toilet is blocked and smells so bad, the walls are lettered with fungi, the roads are impassable because of potholes, the hospitals does not have the basics and even electricity is not just unstable but hardly stays for one hour, roads are not swept as people litters the streets while eating as the move around the streets. the street corners have become toilets as people discharge urine  and poo shamelessly on the streets. The colonial masters will not recognize what they left in Marina (Lagos-island) when it was the Capital 

There is a certain kind of collapse that does not announce itself with thunder. It does not arrive in a single catastrophic moment that shocks a nation to its feet. It comes quietly, incrementally, in the way that rust comes first at the edges, then deeper, then so thoroughly that what once held weight can no longer hold anything at all. It is the collapse of maintenance culture, and it is perhaps the most honest mirror a society can hold up to itself. For how a people treat what they have built tells you everything about what they truly believe  about the future, about each other, about themselves.

Walk through Marina in Lagos and you will see it with your own eyes. You will see it before you smell it, and you will smell it before you understand it. The buildings that once stood as declarations of ambition tall, colonial, proudly functional now wear their age not as dignity but as neglect. Paint peels from walls like skin from a wound that was never dressed. Balconies sag with the tiredness of structures that have been used but never loved. The lifts those small mechanical promises of modernity stand frozen in their shafts, their buttons dusty, their cables silent, monuments to the moment someone decided that repair was someone else's responsibility. And so people climb. They climb because the machines that were built to carry them have been abandoned, and in a society without maintenance culture, the living learn to compensate for the dying infrastructure with their own bodies.

The roads tell the same story in a different tongue. They are not merely potholed they are wounded, cratered by years of traffic and rain and the absolute indifference of those appointed to care for them. To drive through them is to negotiate, to swerve, to pray, to rage quietly at a steering wheel that deserves none of it. The markings have faded into ghost lines that no longer guide anyone anywhere. The drains choke on refuse they were never designed to carry, and when the rains come, as they always do, the streets transform into rivers and the city remembers, briefly, that it was built on land that water has never entirely surrendered.

And then there is the matter of human dignity the final casualty of a society that has stopped maintaining itself. When the public conveniences disappear, when the laws that protect shared spaces grow so weak they are treated as suggestions, when no one is held accountable for the commons because the commons belongs to everyone and therefore to no one people adapt. They adapt in the most primal ways. They find walls and corners and the shadows of broken structures and they do what the body demands, because the city has offered them no alternative. It is not savagery. It is the logical conclusion of abandonment. When a society stops maintaining its structures, it eventually stops maintaining its dignity.

The tragedy is not only in the decay itself, but in the normalization of it. There is nothing more dangerous than a people who have made peace with collapse. When the broken lift becomes simply the lift that doesn't work, when the crumbling wall becomes simply that wall, when the stench becomes simply the way it smells here the rot has completed its deepest work. It has moved from the buildings into the imagination. It has convinced an entire people that this is not only what is, but what must be. That maintenance is a luxury. That standards are for elsewhere. That the gap between what was built and what now stands is simply the price of existing in this place, at this time.

But a society is judged  by history, by its children, by the silent verdict of its own streets  not by the grandeur of what it erects, but by the seriousness with which it tends what it has erected. The great civilizations were not simply those who built. They were those who understood that building is only the beginning. That a road not maintained becomes a field. That a building not tended becomes a ruin. That a law not enforced becomes a rumor. That a standard not upheld becomes a memory.

Where are the intelligent minds that should be reassessing these systems? Where are the engineers who should be measuring the rot and drafting the remedies? Where are the urban planners who should be asking hard questions about what this city is becoming and what it needs to survive its own future? Where are the lawmakers with the courage to enforce what is already written, to make the littering costly, the defecation in public spaces shameful, the neglect of common infrastructure a matter of civic and criminal consequence? They exist, surely brilliant, trained, capable. But brilliance without institutional will is a lamp in a room with no windows. It illuminates nothing that matters.

The Marina did not decay in a day. It decayed in a thousand small surrenders each unrepaired crack, each unfiled report, each budget reallocated away from maintenance toward something more immediately political, each officer who looked at a violation and looked away, each citizen who said what can I do and returned to their compound and locked the gate. Decay is always a collective achievement. It requires the participation of the powerful who neglect and the powerless who endure and the great middle who have simply stopped believing that anything can be different.

But it can be different. That is the other truth, the one that must be said in the same breath as the indictment. Societies have looked at their own rot and chosen repair. Cities have stood in their own ruins and built again not just the structures, but the culture of tending structures. It begins not with money, though money is needed. It begins with the decision that what we have built is worth keeping. That the public space is sacred. That the street outside belongs to all of us and therefore demands something from all of us. That a working lift in a public building is not a luxury it is a statement about what kind of society we intend to be.

Until that decision is made truly made, in policy and in practice and in the pride of ordinary citizens the rot will continue its quiet, patient, thorough work. And the buildings will lean a little further. And the roads will open a little wider. And the city will look in the mirror of its own streets and see, if it is honest enough to look, exactly what it has chosen to become.