The Two-Track System
When you’re working with Nigerians, expect two processes to run at the same time — the official one and the real one. The official process has the paperwork, the steps, the forms, the signatures. The real process runs through relationships, phone calls, informal arrangements, and knowing who to speak to. Both matter. The official process gives you legitimacy and documentation. The informal process gives you movement and access. Nigerians are expert at navigating both simultaneously, and they expect their counterparts to understand that both exist. If you only follow the official process, you’ll often find things stalling for no apparent reason. If you understand that there’s also a relational, informal channel to work, you’ll find things start moving. Don’t be thrown by this — it’s not a sign that something is broken. It’s simply how the system operates.
Relationships Are the Real Infrastructure
In Nigeria, your network isn’t just useful — it’s essential. Who you know determines how your processes move. Before you can get much done in a Nigerian institutional context, you need to know the right person, or know someone who knows them. This isn’t corruption or nepotism — it’s the way the infrastructure works. Nigerians invest seriously in building and maintaining relationships because they understand that those relationships are what make things possible. If you’re working in a Nigerian context, invest time in getting to know people properly. Go to the events, make the calls, remember the family occasions. When you need something to move and you have a relationship with the right person, things happen. Without that relationship, you may find the formal process perfectly correct but completely stuck.
What Matters Is What Gets Done
Nigerians measure process by its results. If the outcome is achieved, the process worked — regardless of whether every step was followed in the prescribed order. This makes Nigerian professionals highly practical and highly creative under pressure. They won’t get stuck insisting on a step that isn’t serving the goal; they’ll find another route. This is an enormous strength in environments where things change fast and plans don’t survive contact with reality. If you’re working with Nigerian colleagues, don’t be surprised when they take a different path to the destination than the one you mapped out. The question they’re asking is always: are we going to get there? How we get there is secondary. Judge them by delivery, and you’ll find they often overdeliver.
When the Path Closes, Find Another
Nigerians have a deep cultural capacity for improvisation when formal systems fail. Power goes out: the generator comes on. The bank is closed: the mobile transfer goes through. The official process is blocked: a workaround is found. This isn’t luck — it’s a trained competence, developed over generations of navigating infrastructure scarcity and institutional unreliability. In professional contexts, this means your Nigerian partners and colleagues are often already three steps into the solution before others have finished describing the problem. If you’re building a project with Nigerian teams, this resilience is an asset. Don’t design processes that require everything to go perfectly. Design them to allow the improvisation that will happen when something doesn’t — because something always does, and the response will usually be inventive.
It Moves When the Right Person Moves It
In Nigeria, authority is a process shortcut. The person at the top of any organization can make things happen that formal process would take weeks to grind through. Getting access to the right decision-maker — not just their subordinates or their documentation processes — is therefore a primary strategy. Before you invest time working through the formal layers of any Nigerian institution, ask yourself: who is the person who can actually say yes? And can I get in front of them? Nigerians understand this instinctively and will often route around formal process to get a direct conversation with the person who matters. This isn’t disrespect for the process; it’s a realistic understanding of where process authority actually lives. Cultivate access to decision-makers, and your processes will move faster and more reliably.
The Spiritual Dimension Is Real
In Nigeria, prayer before a significant undertaking isn’t a formality — it’s a genuine process step. Whether it’s a team meeting opened with prayer, a business decision preceded by a night of spiritual preparation, or an important event launched with a blessing, the spiritual dimension of process is taken seriously across the country. This reflects a sincere belief that outcomes depend on both human effort and divine involvement, and that spiritual preparation is a legitimate and necessary part of preparing for anything important. If you’re working with Nigerian colleagues, respect this — don’t rush past it or treat it as a ritual to be politely tolerated. It matters to people deeply. And if you’re leading a team that includes Nigerians, know that they may need time for spiritual preparation before significant decisions or undertakings. That time is not lost; it is invested.
The Process Belongs to Everyone
In Nigeria, important things are done together. A wedding, a business launch, a major decision — these are community events, and the community needs to be involved for the outcome to be legitimate. If you make a decision without consulting the people it affects, they may comply formally while withholding the genuine commitment that makes implementation work. Nigerian process culture has a built-in check: did the right people participate? If they didn’t, the outcome is technically valid but socially fragile. In practice, this means you should invest in genuine consultation before finalizing important processes. Get the relevant stakeholders into the room. Let people contribute. The time this takes at the front end pays back in execution energy. A decision that everyone helped make is a decision everyone will implement.