I’ve heard it more times than I can count. Nigerians, especially those from Lagos, complaining about how slow other Africans are. It usually comes with that familiar tone: a mix of irritation and disbelief, and underneath it, this subtle sense of “we know how to move, these ones don’t.” We say it in meetings, at airports, at conferences, sometimes even to their faces.
The moment you land in Dakar or Kigali or somewhere that isn’t Nigeria, it starts. You get to the airport and the immigration officer is taking their time. The driver comes ten minutes late but isn’t even apologetic. You go to the hotel restaurant and the food takes 30 minutes. And somehow, in your head, everything starts to feel wrong. “Why are they walking so slowly? Why is nobody in a rush? Why do they close shop at 5pm?” You start itching to take control. And before long, you arrive at the usual conclusion that these people must be slow.
But that’s the thing I’ve had to rethink over time. Are they actually slow, or are we just… mad?
Because when I really sit with it, when I look back at all the years I’ve spent working across different African countries meeting regulators, building teams, chasing timelines, trying to get products into new markets, what I see is not slowness but rather a different rhythm, shaped by people who have not made constant urgency a central part of their daily lives.
The truth is, what we Nigerians call “slow” is often just how the rest of the world moves. We’ve gotten so used to chaos and pressure that anything short of that feels like a problem. But it’s not. It’s just… normal. We’re the ones who have been conditioned to treat every task like a fire drill. And when you’re wired like that, calm can start to feel like incompetence even when it’s not.
The numbers tell a story too. Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, with over 230 million people. Lagos alone has more people than the entire nation of Botswana. In 2023, Lagos recorded an average daily traffic time of over 75 minutes, one of the highest in Africa. This statistic is more than just transportation delays; it represents hours of accumulated stress, pressure, and mental exhaustion. Add to that the persistent power supply challenges, with the country generating less than 4,000 megawatts for the whole country on most days, alongside deteriorating infrastructure, a rapidly growing youth population competing for limited opportunities, and one of the continent’s highest unemployment rates. When you put all these factors together, it becomes clearer why the feeling of urgency has become as essential to Nigerians as breathing. You begin to understand why Nigerians have to hustle for everything. Nigerians wake up and their day already feels like war. So they push themselves to move fast. Not because it’s more efficient, but because the system is broken and moving slow could mean missing out on many opportunities, however small it may be.
Most of this madness we carry around has its roots in Lagos
The way we work and push ourselves, and the way we react to stress and pressure almost without thinking, all come from the kind of conditioning that living in Lagos forces on you. There is something about the city that doesn’t just ask you to move quickly, it demands it. You cannot live in Lagos and stay soft. The city will stretch you, squeeze every ounce of patience out of you, and still expect you to show up the next morning and perform at full capacity. Else, it ejects you for non-performance.
People talk about Nigerian energy, but even within that, Lagos has its own kind. It is louder, moves faster, feels more aggressive, and carries a level of chaos that stands apart. In all honesty, this goes beyond the pace of work or the level of ambition. Even though the environment itself is designed in a way that keeps you on edge from the moment you wake up.
You open your eyes and the problems are already waiting for you; The electricity is out, the generator won’t start because the fuel you bought last night was diluted, the roads are heavily flooded, and the candidate you are supposed to onboard for a project is stranded somewhere in traffic that has barely moved for hours.
At the same time, a dissatisfied customer has taken to Twitter to publicly call out your business, demanding an immediate solution and you are expected to fix the issue immediately and respond with perfect grammar. This is not a rare day, it’s a typical Tuesday in Lagos. And somehow, you get through it. Then you wake up and do it all over again. Eventually, you stop seeing it as chaos. It becomes your new normal.
So when you take that Lagos kind of energy and try to apply it in a city like Gaborone or Lusaka, where people are not constantly running from one fire to another, the contrast is hard to ignore. You move with the same sense of urgency, and everyone around you looks like they are on vacation. You send five follow-up emails in one afternoon and think you are being thorough. Meanwhile, your colleagues are wondering why you are so intense. The problem is not that they are slow, you are simply running on survival instinct and expecting everyone else to match you.
This is where a lot of us get it wrong because we assume Lagos is the benchmark for productivity, yet the reality is far from that. Lagos is not a model anyone should try to replicate; it is a pressure cooker that forces you to build a kind of stamina you should never have needed to build in the first place.
The systems do not work, so you become the system. The urgency you carry around is not always driven by excellence. A lot of the time, it is driven by dysfunction. When you have spent years operating inside a storm, you start to see peace and stability as laziness. You think if someone is not stressed or constantly multitasking, they must not be serious. But that is not true. That is just what Lagos (in extension, Nigeria) has taught us to believe.
The real reason Nigerians seem to “shine” abroad
People like to say it is because we are naturally hardworking. That Nigerians are just born with this extra capacity for hustle. It has almost become folklore; this belief that we have something in our DNA that makes us succeed wherever we go. But the truth, at least from what I have seen and lived, is far less romantic. Nigerians who manage to leave the country are not just regular citizens. They are people who have already survived a brutal filtering process before ever stepping on a plane. The average Nigerian abroad is not there because of luck or chance. They are there because they fought their way out.
If you have ever tried to leave Nigeria, you know what that path looks like. You first have to survive the education system, with all its dysfunction. You have to deal with university strikes, missing transcripts, lecturers who ghost you for months, and final year projects that stall for no reason. After that, you enter the endless web of applying for visas, getting bank statements that look strong enough, and trying to convince a foreign embassy that you are not a flight risk. All of this while earning in naira but paying in dollars or pounds or euros. Then there is the task of translating your Nigerian qualifications and experience into something that makes sense in another country. You have to explain your second class upper in a way that does not make you sound unserious. You have to repackage your NYSC year so it sounds like real work experience. By the time you finally board that plane to Toronto or Berlin or anywhere else, you are not just leaving the country. You are carrying the residue of everything you had to overcome to get that far.
This is why we tend to show up differently abroad. We are used to pushing. We are used to things not working and having to find a way regardless. It is not magic, it is survival instinct. And that instinct is usually very strong in the kind of Nigerians who manage to leave. So yes, we often come across as driven, as resourceful, as intense. But we need to be careful not to mistake that for being better than anyone else. What we are is a product of pressure. Nigeria squeezes you, and the ones who do not break end up looking like outliers.
The other side of it, though, is that when you are used to dysfunction, you carry that energy everywhere. You get into systems that are stable, and you start overreacting to things that are perfectly normal. You do not know how to take your foot off the gas. You keep scanning for problems, even when there are none. And that kind of energy, while useful in high-stakes environments, can become a liability when calmness and collaboration are what is actually needed. So yes, we shine abroad, but we also need to admit that we shine with a kind of restlessness that did not come from excellence alone. It came from a system that forced us to always be on edge.
Other Africans are not slow
What they have, more often than not, is a clear sense of boundaries. And to be honest, I find myself admiring that more than I like to admit. I envy the people who can shut their laptops at 5pm without feeling like they are committing a crime. I envy the ones who do not feel the need to be permanently available, constantly stressed, or always a few steps ahead of a problem that does not yet exist. I envy the managers who can get work done without turning every task into a dramatic performance. I envy the teams that can walk into a 10am meeting without carrying the emotional weight of ten unfinished items from the night before.
What we often label as slowness is really just balance. People in other African countries seem to have held on to something we have lost, which is the idea that work is important, but it is not everything.
They value rest and maintain clear working hours, and when a task shifts by a day, they do not respond with panic but instead adjust without seeing it as a failure or a sign of poor performance. In many of the countries I have had the pleasure of interacting with, you can feel the difference. People still take lunch breaks without shame. They do not brag about working on weekends, or try to impress anyone with how tired they are. And that, in its own way, is a kind of confidence we don’t talk about enough.
For Nigerians, this is difficult to understand. Our default mindset is that if something is not urgent, it is not important. We have built entire work cultures around pressure and last-minute delivery. If you are not panicking, people assume you are unserious. If you are not calling people after hours, they think you do not care about the outcome. We wear exhaustion like a badge. And we expect others to do the same. So when we meet people who are firm about their time, who are not constantly available, who prioritize recovery and mental space, it annoys us. We think they are dragging their feet. But they are not. They are just refusing to live in crisis mode.
This is not to say there are no hard workers outside Nigeria. That would be unfair and untrue. People everywhere work hard. But in some places, they have figured out how to do that without losing their minds. They have systems that support them, and they have made peace with the idea that work will always be there, but they do not have to be consumed by it. So when Nigerians step into those environments, we often mistake that peace for inefficiency. What we call slow is actually just people refusing to burn out. And maybe we should be learning from that instead of judging it.
But let’s not pretend all Nigerians are high-speed machines
It would be misleading to suggest that every Nigerian operates at the same level of urgency or intensity. I know I’ve painted a picture of Nigerians as relentless go-getters, constantly moving, always chasing the next big thing, but that is only one part of the story. Nigeria has plenty of people whose pace is much slower, and sometimes painfully so. If you have ever tried to renew a passport or register a business, you already know what I mean. Walk into any government office and you will be met with a kind of slowness that feels almost deliberate. People stroll into work late, take long breaks, and act like every simple task is a complicated favour. In those spaces, urgency is treated like a nuisance rather than a standard.
It is not just in the public sector. The armed forces is another place where things move with a kind of bureaucratic drag. Even outside formal institutions, there is a whole segment of Nigerians, often from the older generation, who still approach work and time the way it was done decades ago. Meetings that could have been emails still happen. Technology is avoided where possible. The pace is slower, expectations are lower, and sense of urgency we see in younger, urban Nigerians is largely absent.
All of this is to say that Nigerians are not a single type of person. We are not all hyper-driven or obsessed with results. What has happened, though, is that the Nigerians who get the most visibility tend to be the ones who are operating at that extreme level. The startup founders, the scholarship winners, the tech bros, the creatives making waves in London or New York; these are the people who get noticed. Their stories are amplified, and they become the poster children for what it means to be Nigerian. And while their hustle is real and impressive, it is not the full picture.
There are millions of Nigerians who are not pushing themselves to the limit. They are not building anything groundbreaking, and they are not breaking into global spaces. They are just doing what they need to do to get by. And that is perfectly fine. Unfortunately, we tend to overlook this group whenever conversations about Nigerian energy take place, focusing instead on the more visible and intense examples that dominate the narrative.
We pretend the exceptions are the rule, and we let the loudest voices define the entire identity. But if we are going to be honest about who we are, we have to admit that the full spectrum includes all kinds of people; from those who move quickly to those who take their time, from those who push relentlessly to those who are satisfied with less, and from those who speak loudly to those who operate more quietly.
So what’s the takeaway?
Every country builds its own way of working. Each one develops its own rhythm over time, shaped by history, systems, values, and the day-to-day realities of life in that place. What feels urgent in one country may feel unnecessary in another. What looks like calm in one place might look like delay to someone else. Nigeria’s rhythm, especially the version that comes out of Lagos, has become fast, intense, and often chaotic. It works well when you need to move quickly, solve problems on the fly, or adapt to constant disruption. But it also burns people out. It creates stress that is so common we do not even notice it anymore. It makes it hard to slow down, even when slowing down would lead to better outcomes.
This kind of energy does not always translate well when Nigerians interact with other African countries. When we enter spaces where things move more steadily, we often become frustrated. We assume that if something is not happening fast, then something must be wrong. We try to push others to adopt our tempo without first understanding theirs. We judge rather than observe. And in doing so, we fail to see that our way is just one of many. It is not always better, just louder.
It might be time we stopped seeing ourselves as the standard that others need to meet. Nigerians are not superior because we move quickly, and other Africans are not inferior because they choose to move differently. What we call madness in ourselves is often a response to chaos. What we call slowness in others is often just the presence of structure. The truth probably lives somewhere in the middle.
I think we could all gain something by recognising that. Nigerians could learn to slow down just enough to breathe, to think more clearly, and to stop assuming everything must happen immediately. Other Africans might benefit from picking up a bit more urgency when it matters, not because they are wrong, but because there are moments when speed is necessary. Neither side has the complete answer. But between the intensity of the Nigerian hustle and the steadiness of other African work cultures, there is a space where things can actually work better for everyone.
At the end of the day, most people are doing the best they can in the environment that has shaped them, and while some of us were taught to sprint, others learned to move with more deliberate steps, which does not necessarily make one approach better than the other but simply shows that they are different, and if we stop trying to fix one another and instead take the time to listen, we might find there is something useful to learn.