A 2021 study on public service perception among young and middle-aged Nigerians found that they view public service negatively, both in how it operates and what it offers. Final-year undergraduates were the most pessimistic group, according to the research.
Chioma Bright-Uhara, deputy director of communications at the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation, writes that many talented young Nigerians consistently choose careers elsewhere, causing public institutions to lose fresh thinking, high expectations, and the energy of people who believe things can be different.
The Perception Gap
Bright-Uhara notes that she did not grow up planning to care about public service, despite her parents being dedicated public servants. Other options felt more exciting and aligned with the impact she wanted to make. It was only later, working closely with public institutions through her role at the foundation, that she realized public service is not a background feature of national development but its foundation.
The reasons for the negative perception are not hard to find. Many young Nigerians have grown up around stories of bureaucracy, delays, and frustration. Those with direct experience, through the National Youth Service Corps or as citizens trying to access services, do not always leave with their optimism intact. For a generation that moves fast and expects results, a system that appears to move slowly and reward patience over performance is not an easy sell.
What We Lose When Talent Walks Away
Nigeria's public institutions exist to deliver education, healthcare, infrastructure, and essential services to millions of people. When talented young people consistently choose to build their careers elsewhere, those institutions lose something they cannot easily replace. Over time, this creates a quiet but serious problem: systems designed to serve a young, dynamic population end up shaped by fewer and fewer young voices. The gap between who builds public institutions and who those institutions are meant to serve keeps widening. The consequences show up in people's daily lives—in how long they wait, how much they receive, and how much they trust the state to show up for them.
The Work Already Happening
The loudest stories about Nigeria's public sector are stories of dysfunction, but they are not the whole story. Across public institutions, there are officials doing work that rarely attracts attention: improving data systems, streamlining service delivery, reducing friction, and finding ways to make things work better within systems not always built for efficiency. These people exist, and their work is real. It simply does not travel as far as the stories of what is broken.
This matters because the narrative shapes the pipeline. If the only stories young people hear about public service are stories of stagnation, the most ambitious among them will continue to look elsewhere, and the institutions that need new energy will continue without it.
What Rebuilding Belief Actually Requires
When young people turn away from public service, they are not turning away from impact. They are turning away from a system they believe is too difficult to change. The work of shifting that perception is not just a communications challenge; it is a governance challenge. This is part of what drives the work at the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation, which invests in strengthening public servants—building their skills, confidence, and capacity for systems-level thinking—so that government institutions can perform better and deliver more for citizens.
It is not glamorous work in the way that launching a startup is, but over time, it changes what public service looks and feels like from the inside. When institutions function better and produce results that people can actually see, they become more credible and spaces that ambitious, capable young people can imagine themselves in.
If Nigeria wants stronger public institutions in ten years, it needs young people today who still believe those institutions are worth their talent. That means more than encouraging people to serve; it means showing them, with evidence and with stories, that public service is a place where committed people make real differences. Institutions do not get better on their own. They get better when people decide they are worth staying in, worth improving, and worth fighting for from the inside. That decision starts with belief, and belief starts with the stories we choose to tell.
