The Cost of Surviving: How Global Capitalism Is Reshaping Youth Identity in Nigeria

In July 2023, a young Nigerian man posted a short video on X. He was sitting outside a bank in Lagos, waiting for a failed transaction to reverse. “I graduated five years ago,” he said calmly. “I’ve done everything right. By day, I sell phone accessories online. By night, I drive for a ride-hailing app. “This is not ambition, I’m still just surviving.”

The video went viral, not because it was dramatic, but because it was relatable. Thousands replied with versions of the same story.

This is the condition shaping youth identity in Nigeria today: not ambition, not hope, but survival.

In contemporary Nigeria, survival is no longer merely an economic condition. It has become an identity. For millions of young people, life is organised not around long-term aspiration, civic participation, or personal fulfilment, but around an urgent and continuous struggle to stay afloat. Survival shapes how young Nigerians speak, plan, form relationships, and imagine the future. The language of hustle, grind, and escape has replaced older vocabularies of belonging, purpose, and stability.

This transformation is often explained through familiar national narratives: corruption, bad governance, policy failure. While these factors are real, they are insufficient. What is happening to Nigerian youth is not simply a local crisis; it is a concentrated expression of global capitalism’s logic as it operates in the Global South. Survival has become the dominant mode of existence because global economic systems have rendered dignity, security, and predictability structurally inaccessible.

Survival as Structure, Not Exception

Nigeria is home to one of the world’s youngest populations, yet youth unemployment and underemployment remain entrenched. Even for graduates, formal employment is scarce, wages are unstable, and inflation steadily erodes purchasing power. According to recent labour data, the vast majority of young Nigerians are pushed into informal or precarious work, often without contracts, protections, or long-term prospects.

Nigerian writer and journalist Elnathan John has documented social and political dysfunction in Nigeria, including how weak state infrastructure and economic instability collapse the horizon of possibility for young people. In his essays, everyday life is marked by improvisation: power outages, transport failures, rising food costs, and unreliable institutions that make long-term planning feel irrational. Survival becomes not a phase of life but a permanent orientation.

This condition does more than constrain material life, it reorganises subjectivity itself. When survival becomes the overriding concern, identity collapses into economic function. Skills are pursued not out of interest but out of necessity. Time is fragmented into short-term calculations. Relationships are filtered through economic usefulness. The future, once imagined as something to be built, becomes something to escape.

Among the Nigerian youth, the popular phrase “na survival” captures this shift. It is not a rallying cry, but a resignation, an acknowledgement that hardship is permanent and individualised rather than political. Survival ceases to be a temporary state and becomes a lifelong condition to be managed.

Hustle Culture and the Moralisation of Precarity

Global capitalism does not merely impose material hardship; it supplies the ideological language through which hardship is interpreted. In Nigeria, hustle culture has emerged as the dominant moral framework of youth life. Social media platforms glorify endless productivity, self-branding, and the monetisation of every skill. Structural scarcity is reframed as personal opportunity.

Investigative journalist Kiki Mordi best known for her Emmy-nominated Sex for Grades documentary exposing sexual harassment in West African universities, has highlighted how hustle culture masks structural collapse, presenting overwork and self-exploitation as personal choice rather than economic necessity. The language of entrepreneurship obscures the absence of social protection, labour rights, and functional public services.

Unlike in wealthier economies, where hustle culture often exists alongside some safety nets, Nigerian youth are hustling without a floor beneath them. Failure is not a setback; it is catastrophe. As a result, identity becomes transactional. Young people learn to see themselves as products, valuable only insofar as they can generate income.

This narrative mirrors neoliberal ideology, which shifts responsibility away from institutions and onto individuals. Unemployment becomes a failure of mindset. Economic instability becomes a lack of discipline. Young people are told to “create value” in an economy that systematically devalues their labour.

Hustle culture functions as a disciplinary mechanism. It encourages self-exploitation while masking the absence of social protection, labour rights, or public investment. Its psychological costs are substantial: burnout, anxiety, and a persistent sense of inadequacy, even among those who appear successful. When worth is measured solely by productivity, rest becomes guilt, and failure becomes shame.

Migration as Identity Project

For many young Nigerians, survival increasingly means leaving. The recent surge in migration commonly described as “japa”— a Yoruba term meaning “to flee”  now commonly used to describe migration driven less by ambition than by exhaustion, economic precarity, and the desire to escape a system perceived as offering no future. It is often framed in economic terms: wages, currency stability, job availability. But migration is also an identity project shaped by global inequality.

Nigerian journalist Pelumi Salako, among others, has reported on how young people frame migration not as a dream of prosperity but as an exit from despair. Leaving becomes a way to reclaim dignity, stability, and the possibility of rest. Remaining behind is often read as failure, regardless of personal circumstances.

To leave is not merely to seek income; it is to reclaim dignity. Global capitalism produces uneven geographies of hope, where certain places are coded as sites of possibility and others as dead ends. Nigeria, integrated into the global economy largely as a source of labour, raw materials, and consumption, is positioned as a place to exit rather than invest in.

This creates a central contradiction. Young people are encouraged to innovate and be entrepreneurial, yet the system offers its greatest rewards only to those who can physically exit it. Survival becomes synonymous with departure, reinforcing global hierarchies of value while hollowing out local futures.

The Global Logic of Local Crisis

Nigeria’s youth crisis cannot be understood in isolation. Decades of structural adjustment, debt dependency, and market liberalisation have weakened the state’s capacity to provide employment, welfare, and infrastructure. Public goods have been privatised, labour protections eroded, and economic risk transferred onto individuals.

At the same time, multinational corporations extract value through digital platforms, informal supply chains, and consumer markets, with minimal reinvestment in social stability. Nigerian youth are incorporated into the global economy as precarious workers, data producers, and consumers rarely as beneficiaries.

This pattern is replicated across much of the Global South. From South Asia to Latin America, young people face similar contradictions: high education with low returns, relentless competition for scarce opportunities, and the internalisation of structural failure. Nigeria’s scale simply makes the consequences more visible.

Identity Under Pressure

When survival dominates life, identity narrows. Political participation declines, not because of apathy, but because engagement carries costs many cannot afford. Art, culture, and community are squeezed between economic demands. Even resistance risks becoming transactional, filtered through NGO funding cycles or digital visibility.

Yet survival does not fully erase collective life. Informal solidarities, mutual aid networks, and creative subcultures continue to emerge beneath the surface of economic precarity. These practices reveal a tension between imposed economic identities and lived social needs between what global capitalism demands and what it means to remain human.

Beyond Survival

To describe survival as an identity is not to romanticise struggle but to expose its political construction. Survival has been normalised because alternatives have been systematically dismantled.

This distinguishes Nigerian youth experience from similar global phenomena, such as China’s “lay-flat” movement, where withdrawal from overwork becomes a form of quiet resistance. Nigerian youth cannot afford to lay flat. The cost of withdrawal is too high. Instead, resistance takes the form of exit whether that be physical, emotional, or psychological

Reclaiming youth identity requires more than resilience; it demands structural transformation reinvestment in public goods, labour protections, and economic systems that value life beyond productivity.

Global capitalism thrives on rendering its human costs invisible. Nigeria’s youth crisis makes those costs impossible to ignore. The question is not whether young people can survive, but why survival has been made the highest imaginable ambition.

Until that question is confronted locally and globally, survival will continue to define identity, and identity will continue to carry the weight of an unjust economic order.

Young Nigerians do not lack ambition. What they lack is a system that allows ambition to mean something more than staying afloat.