When Citizens Adapt To Bad Governance, Everyone Loses
Africa and the Developing World’s Dangerous Normalisation of Unaccountable Power
By Jessy Samuel Ejah
Africa’s governance problems are usually narrated through the actions of governments and political leaders. Elections are disputed. Institutions are hollowed out. Corruption scandals surface and fade. Public services fail. Leaders are accused, investigated, occasionally punished — and life continues largely as before.
These criticisms are, in most cases, justified. Power that goes unchecked will, sooner or later, be abused. That is not a uniquely African condition; it is a condition of power itself.
But there is a second question buried inside the first one, and it receives far less attention than it deserves: what happens when citizens gradually adapt to bad governance?
Bad governance does not usually survive because citizens approve of it. It survives because people become accustomed to it. That distinction — between approval and habituation — is one of the most consequential and least examined dynamics in the politics of the developing world.
A society can be furious with its government and still be quietly adapting its behaviour to that government’s failures at the very same time. Citizens condemn corruption in public while relying on personal connections in private to obtain the services they are legally owed. They denounce political patronage while depending on political networks for jobs and opportunity. They distrust public institutions while structuring their lives to avoid ever needing them.
Over time, survival begins to replace expectation as the operating relationship between citizen and state. And when that substitution is complete, something far more profound than inconvenience has occurred.
From Outrage to Adaptation
Bad governance rarely becomes normal overnight. It accumulates in increments too small to register individually and too large to ignore collectively.
An official abuses power. Citizens protest. The press reports it. Politicians promise reform. The public, exhausted, moves on. Then another scandal appears. Another institution quietly fails. Another promise dissolves. Eventually — and this is the crucial turn — the extraordinary becomes ordinary.
Citizens absorb the unofficial rules of the system faster than they absorb its official ones. They learn whom to call, whom to know, which procedures can be bypassed and which cannot. They stop expecting institutions to operate according to the rules written in law and begin navigating, instead, the rules that actually govern daily life. This is one of the most dangerous stages of institutional decline — not because institutions are failing, which is bad enough on its own, but because citizens have begun quietly reorganising their lives around that failure, as though it were permanent weather rather than a solvable problem.
Public opinion data across the continent bears this out. Afrobarometer’s most recent survey round, covering 39 African countries, found fewer than half of citizens trust their president (46%), police (46%), courts of law (47%) or Parliament (37%) — and trust in every one of these institutions has declined over the past decade. That figure alone is not a crisis. Healthy democracies are supposed to contain sceptical citizens; distrust, in the right dose, is a civic immune response.
The deeper problem begins when distrust curdles into resignation. There is an enormous distance between saying, “I don’t trust this institution, so I want it reformed,” and saying, “I don’t trust this institution, so I have learned how to live without it.” The first produces democratic pressure. The second produces democratic stagnation — and it is the second sentence, quietly repeated in millions of households, that this essay is concerned with.
The Survival Economy of Dysfunction
In dysfunctional systems, informal solutions frequently become more reliable than formal institutions — which is precisely why they persist.
A citizen who cannot obtain a service through the official channel seeks someone who knows someone inside the institution. A young graduate who cannot find work through merit alone looks for a political or personal connection instead. A business owner facing an inefficient bureaucracy discovers, often within the first year of operation, that relationships outperform rules.
None of this reflects a moral failure on the part of the individual. It is, in almost every case, a rational response to an irrational system. If the formal system fails you reliably enough, adapting to it stops being a compromise and becomes an act of self-preservation.
But rational individual choices can still aggregate into an irrational collective outcome. Millions of individual survival strategies, each perfectly sensible on its own terms, can together construct a political culture that allows dysfunction to endure indefinitely. That is the paradox at the centre of this argument: the citizen who learns to survive a broken system is demonstrating genuine resilience, but a society in which everyone has learned to survive broken systems can become measurably less capable of demanding that those systems be repaired.
This is the precise point at which governance stops being only a political issue and becomes a civic one as well.
Resilience: Strength, or Substitute for Reform?
Africa is full of resilient citizens, and this resilience is one of the continent’s genuine strengths, not a consolation prize for its weaknesses. People build businesses despite unreliable infrastructure. They educate their children despite inadequate public schools. They construct informal economies where formal employment does not exist. They hold families and communities together when state systems cannot.
But there is a real danger when resilience becomes romanticised rather than interrogated. A population should not have to be endlessly resilient simply because its institutions are endlessly dysfunctional. There is a point past which celebrating people’s ability to cope quietly absolves governments of responsibility for creating the very conditions people are coping with.
The question, then, should not only be how resilient are African citizens? It should also be why are citizens required to be this resilient in the first place? Genuine development is measured, in part, by how many problems ordinary citizens no longer have to personally overcome just to live an ordinary life.
When Connections Replace Institutions
One of the clearest early warning signs of institutional weakness is the moment personal relationships begin to outperform institutional rules.
In a functioning system, citizens should not need to know the right person to receive a service they are legally entitled to. They should not need political connections to access opportunity that merit alone should unlock. They should not have to negotiate, privately and case by case, for rights that institutions are supposed to guarantee publicly and uniformly.
Once this becomes the norm, citizenship itself quietly changes character. People stop experiencing the state primarily as a system of rights and responsibilities and start experiencing it as a network of gatekeepers to be navigated. This produces a particularly corrosive form of political inequality: those with connections move through the system with relative ease, while those without them absorb the full weight of institutional failure. The result is not merely inefficient governance — it is a society in which one’s practical access to the state depends less on citizenship and more on proximity to power.
The Danger of Lowered Expectations
Perhaps the most underestimated consequence of chronic bad governance is the slow, almost invisible lowering of public expectation.
A citizen who once demanded reliable electricity eventually buys a generator and stops asking why the grid remains unreliable. A family that once expected functioning public healthcare eventually comes to depend entirely on private alternatives or informal community support. A business that once demanded predictable regulation simply learns, over time, how to route around bureaucratic obstacles rather than challenge them.
Each of these adjustments is individually rational. Collectively, they remove pressure from the very institutions that most need it. The government, meanwhile, can point to a society that appears to be functioning: businesses are operating, children are attending school, families are surviving, markets are moving. But beneath that surface of apparent normalcy may sit a population quietly absorbing the private cost of a public failure. That is not institutional success. It is institutional cost-shifting — dressed up, convincingly, as stability.
Democracy Requires Expectations, Not Just Elections
Democracy is too often reduced to the mechanics of voting. But elections alone cannot sustain democratic accountability; they are a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
Democracy also requires citizens who believe they are entitled to expect something from those who govern them. They must expect transparency. They must expect competent institutions. They must expect public officials to explain their decisions rather than simply announce them. They must expect corruption to carry real consequences, and public resources to serve public purposes. And, most fundamentally, they must believe that institutions belong to citizens — not to whichever faction happens to be occupying them at a given moment.
Strip away those expectations, and democratic institutions can go on existing in form while quietly hollowing out in substance. This is why civic culture matters as much as constitutional design. Citizens are not merely voters who materialise once every few years; they are, whether they intend to be or not, participants in the daily life of institutions. Journalists, civil society organisations, universities, professional associations, businesses and community groups all shape the culture that surrounds public power. Accountability strengthens wherever scrutiny becomes routine — and weakens wherever it becomes exceptional.
The Role of Citizens — Without Blaming Citizens
An important distinction belongs here, and it should not be glossed over. Arguing that citizens have a role within the governance system is not the same as blaming citizens for government failure.
Responsibility for the exercise of public power remains, first and always, with those who hold it. A citizen who pays a bribe because an official demands one is not morally equivalent to the official abusing his position. A young person who seeks a political connection because merit alone has repeatedly failed to open doors is not equivalent to the political system that manufactured that incentive in the first place. Structural problems should not be quietly recast as individual moral failings.
But recognising structural responsibility does not require pretending that citizens have no agency at all. Citizens can decline to celebrate corruption when it happens to benefit them personally. They can demand transparency even — especially — when their own political allies hold power. They can choose to support institutions over personalities. And, perhaps most importantly of all, they can simply refuse to treat dysfunction as inevitable, which is itself a quiet but consequential act of civic resistance.
Breaking the Cycle
The cycle, reduced to its essentials, is not complicated: weak accountability produces adaptation; adaptation reduces the pressure for reform; and reduced pressure allows weak accountability to continue indefinitely, self-reinforcing at every turn.
Breaking that cycle requires institutional reform and civic renewal moving together, not in sequence. Governments must build institutions that actually work. Citizens must insist that they do. Neither side can permanently substitute for the other, and history offers little evidence that either has ever managed to on its own. The World Bank’s governance work similarly emphasises effective institutions, transparency, accountability and citizen participation as important foundations for development.
Africa’s development debate, in other words, needs to be about considerably more than infrastructure, investment and headline growth figures. Those things matter enormously — no serious argument suggests otherwise. But development also depends on the relationship between citizens and the institutions that govern their daily lives. A country can build roads while quietly losing public trust. It can attract foreign investment while tolerating entrenched corruption. It can hold regular elections while allowing the institutions beneath them to deteriorate year after year. Economic progress and institutional progress do not automatically move at the same speed, and conflating the two is one of the more persistent errors in how development is measured and celebrated. Long-term, durable development requires both moving together.
The Real Measure of Governance
The real test of governance was never whether citizens can survive a broken system. Africans have demonstrated, repeatedly and under extraordinary pressure, that they can. That has never been in serious doubt.
The more important — and more uncomfortable — question is whether citizens are empowered to change the systems they are being forced to survive. That requires governments willing to be genuinely accountable, institutions capable of enforcing their own rules, and citizens unwilling to accept dysfunction as simply the natural order of things.
Africa does not lack resilient people. It never has. What Africa needs is a political culture capable of converting that resilience into participation, expectation and accountability — turning a coping mechanism into a governing demand.
Because citizens should not have to become experts in surviving bad governance.They should be able to expect good governance in the first place. And when citizens adapt too completely to dysfunction, everyone loses in the end — including those who have quietly convinced themselves they have simply learned how to survive it.
Jessy Samuel Ejah is an author, strategic thinker, opinion columnist and media entrepreneur whose work explores governance, citizenship, leadership, accountability, development and
Africa’s place in the global order.
He is the founder of JessyWorldwide, an intellectual platform focused on ideas, people and systems, and Peio Media Company, a media organisation behind several developing platforms covering public affairs, news, development and African perspectives.
Through PeioNews.com, Jessy has built an established digital news platform focused on news and public affairs. He is also developing InsideGov.News, a platform focused on governance, institutions, accountability and the people and systems shaping public life.