Nigeria vs. America— How America’s Culture Enables Innovation while Nigeria’s culture forestalls it and Instill fear

• Culture is how people express what they collectively hold dear, valuable, important and sometimes, sacred.
• What befalls a society is a direct consequence of their culture. A society with no culture does not exists.

[earn] Culture is how people express what they collectively hold dear, valuable, important and sometimes, sacred. Culture sums up the totality of who a group of people are, what they represent, what they want, where they come from and where they are going. What befalls a society is a direct consequence of their culture. [earn] A society with no culture does not exists. Conversely, a society with a strong culture of progress and anti-backwardness is a successful, prosperous society, whereas one with an anti-progressive, barbaric, primitive culture is a backward, archaic, redundant, stagnant, war-torn, violence-ridden, sickness-prone society.

Elements of Nigerian Culture That Should Change

Nigeria is an heterogenous society, that is, comprising of many component nations with their cultures and way of life. But then, Nigeria does have its own collective national culture, that everyone identifies a Nigerian with. Some of this common way of life is not good and has been top of the reasons we keep having a backward-progressing country.

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1. Vindictiveness: Many times, Nigerians do not want an idea to work simply because they were not consulted, left out or they think it is "impossible" for it to work, hence, they withdrawn their support. Even when they withdraw their support, they devise means to forestall further steps to the actualization of the good idea. This was clearly manifest in Nigeria during the 2023 general election. Notable case study is the vindictive behavior against Peter Obi by on Reno Omockery. What happens during a time of electing a country's president is a clear reflection of what the people collectively are. This vindictiveness attribute is the principal reason for sycophancy, godfatherism corporate and public world, lack of innovations etc.

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2. Fear of Failure: This is not because Nigerians are not innovative or industrious, but because majority are afraid to fail. Why? Because they feel when they fail, their "enemies" (fellow Nigerians) will be "vindicated". How will such a society grow? A society where failures is mocked instead of helped is setting itself for backwardness because people will die with their society-changing ideas. What we can learn from America's element of culture that enable innovation is quick acceptance and forgiveness of failure. Stories has it that Tesla in its early stages was failing like no other company. The people behind felt disappointed, Elon Musk quickly accepted the multiple failures and forgave himself and everyone for them. That way, he was able to reposition and reinvest quickly, a move that paid off today. He used the same spreadsheet when his SpaceX company failed multiple times. In every failure, everyone readily embraced it and went back to factory. America's top 1000 corporations faced multiple failures from when they were ideas and concepts to when they thrive to push product to the market. Their strategically structured society where a failed idea and innovation is quickly embraced and forgiven made them succeed.

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3. Fear of Unknown: Talk to a Nigeria today about spirits, practices, and unseen "powers", they will dump their entire life's fears on you and expect you to become fearful like them. Many Nigerians believes every successful, rich person has some form of spiritual protective and enabling services from some unknown places that they were only able to access only because of the availability of money. This causes a lot of harm. That is why to measure up, they form and join secret societies, engage in harmful secret practices or never ever try to innovate that advances an existing product. Element of America's culture that enable innovation in this regard is decision to believe facts and not fiction or sentiment. Many Nigerians do not believe scientific research, if at all they read. This should change. The general society should transition from asking questions like "are you sure?" to "what is the proven evidence of this?" before accepting and believing a narrative about the unknowns in a way that such believes affects if we do certain things or not.

4. Bad Government Actors: Nigerians need to urgently overhaul their government and remove every bad actor from it. All the major inventions that shape the world today were direct US-government efforts and continues to be. The worldwide web, the radiotelephony, GPS, microprocessors etc. [earn] An innovative and curious populace who are confident and it's true that their government's got their back will go to the moon and all the nine planets and back without any other attempting to leave the earth's atmosphere. American government have this relentless obsession with the future, a trait that makes them lead in research on new innovations, new technologies that delivers result faster and cheaper and position them as number in the world. Nigeria will never amount to anything until the government takes the lead. The government will never take this lead until the people take the lead to replace bad political actors with good ones.