Nigeria, Feb. 4 -- I often observe how many people choose to play the ostrich by burying their heads in moral comfort to attack, Nigeria for what they perceive as disappointment, failure, crisis, lack of unity, or arrested progress. In doing so, they consciously or unconsciously promote a strange idea: that a country can be bad without its people being bad. It is a convenient illusion, one that allows indignation without introspection.

My suspicion is that this habitual portrayal of Nigeria as the problem, carefully wrapped in moral outrage or emotional language, is less about patriotism and more about blame-shifting. It reflects an unwillingness to accept the unsettling possibility of personal and collective complicity. After all, it i...