The Record

What this is

Nigerians Ruin Everything is an encyclopedia of contemporary Nigerian popular culture and public life. It documents what this country takes up, from trades and platforms to status formats, rituals and institutions, and what becomes of each one after.

It often repeats itself. Something opens up that is genuinely worth having, a gap the banks ignored, a talent with nowhere to go, a format nobody here had tried. Nigerians rarely take a thing as it arrives, rebuilding it instead with invention, ceremony and commerce until it works the way this country works, and that rebuilding is the part most worth documenting. Word travels, the barrier to entry was never high, and whatever made the thing valuable ends up shared among everyone who heard. The format usually survives in reduced form, together with whatever the serious operators managed to keep. Every entry follows one case through those stages, the background, the boom, the saturation, and where it stands now.

The ruin in the title is not an accusation, and almost every entry here begins with something Nigerians did well.

This page is the entry about the encyclopedia. The counts and the index below are not written by anyone. They are drawn from whatever is published at the moment you load the page, so this page cannot fall out of date with the thing it describes.

How entries are made

An entry begins as a draft, usually from a suggestion, a reader correction, or an editor noticing a pattern. It is researched, sourced, and debated before it is published. Sources carry the date they were last verified.

How the record is kept

Published entries are not finished. Volatile facts are tracked and re-checked on a schedule, and every reader can report something that has gone out of date from the entry itself. Corrections reach the editors directly.

Nothing here is automatic in the way people assume. No system watches the news and rewrites an entry. A person has to look, and this record only holds because people keep looking.