There’s something quite peculiar and absurd about being a Nigerian. It’s a country of – so to speak – unspecified data and dimensions. Nigeria is not simply plagued by inexactitude; it cultivates numerical and other forms of fuzziness.

The other day, Ikhide Ikheloa, one of Nigeria’s most pugnacious gadflies, was waxing indignant on Facebook and Twitter. His grouse? Nigeria has been in the global news on account of the dreadful abduction, on 14 April, of teenage girls from their secondary school in Chibok, Borno State. Ikheloa was riled that nobody in Nigeria, least of all reporters, seemed to know the exact number of girls who were abducted by suspected Boko Haram terrorists.

The initial figures ranged from 100 to more than 200. Later, Asabe Kwambura, the principal of the Government Girls Secondary School, said 230 girls had been abducted. Some said 234. An official of the Borno State government said 129.

That manner of inexact information is painful to stomach. Yet, Nigerians have grown accustomed to it.

It’s deeply frustrating to grapple with such discrepancies when a country is beset by a potentially tragic event. Boko Haram has earned a reputation as a bloodthirsty group. A country shouldn’t sleep easy when members of that extremist sect seize girls whose only crime was studying to prepare themselves for a future of service to their communities.

A day after the abduction, the Nigerian military claimed it had rescued all the girls. Nigerians and the world heaved a sigh of relief. But the military’s claim was a boo-boo. Some of the abducted girls had braved the odds and escaped on their own – that was all. As I write, the combined resources of the Nigerian military and law enforcement have yet to reclaim a single additional victim from the abductors.

Some grief-stricken parents of the abductees have threatened to venture into the Sambisa forests – the abductors’ presumed hiding place – in order to search for and rescue their children. It may well come to that, preposterous as the idea sounds.

It’s a cruel, but true, joke that Nigeria is the most “privatised” country in the world. If a citizen wants water, s/he digs a borehole. If s/he wants sound medical treatment, then s/he must travel abroad to get it. Want electric power? Buy yourself a generator and fuel it. How about security? Pay off the local police chief to acquire two or three police officers – or, better still, hire your own private security. If you want good schools for your children, make/steal enough money to put them in a private school or send them abroad.

For the most part, the Nigerian state abjures all responsibilities to the citizenry. The state exists to empower a tiny few to hijack the country’s resources, and to enjoy perpetual immunity from prosecution for their crimes.

The police are adept at confronting and beating back citizens who gather to stage peaceful protests, but they will never see a corrupt public official, even when s/he’s stealing before the very eyes of law enforcement agents. The State Security Service are quick to seize and interrogate critics of the government, but have found no answers for the ravaging Boko Haram or a way to identify, unmask and prosecute the group’s financiers and sponsors.

At times like this, Nigerians are forced to come to terms with the dire consequences of a culture of mediocrity and ineptitude that we have all adopted, by choice or default. Let’s be frank: all of us, either through our individual choices or by acquiescence in certain maladies, have played some role in feeding, fattening the monster that now terrorises us.

There’s a climate of nonchalance in Nigeria. In the name of ethnic affiliation or sectarian solidarity, too many of us are willing to excuse, defend or justify the contemptible actions of government officials. We have developed handy phrases for rationalising away the Olympian failures of public officials who happen to come from our ethnic enclave, belong to our religious faith, or inhabit the same social circles.

If you point to a politician’s corrupt act, expect her/his apologists to rise to their feet to remind you that s/he’s not the first official in Nigeria’s history to stow away public funds – nor would s/he be the last. If you state that a particular official has not kept a campaign promise, his hirelings trot out the names of past officials who also failed to live up to their words. Point to the fact that most violent crimes in Nigeria go unsolved, and some apologist is apt to assert that some crimes are never solved, either, in the US or UK.

To return to the issue of the abducted girls: How in the world are we going to find them when we don’t seem to know how many were taken in the first place? How are we going to determine that all of them have been accounted for? And how did we concoct this absurdity of a country where it’s possible to snatch up so many girls from their dorms and to disappear with them? These are human beings, vulnerable and innocent, not chicken!

If the Nigerian state and reporters can’t keep count of the number of girls abducted from their school, then what exactly can we know about the space called Nigeria? Can anybody, even government statisticians, claim to know Nigeria’s population within five million people? The matter of the country’s population has always been an absurd game of approximation. We went from 80m to 100m to 120m to 150m to, now, 170m – without the benefit of a fraud-free census. It’s sheer guesswork elevated to an honoured method!

It’s weird and dispiriting, this experience of belonging within a country that can’t or won’t count its people, that can’t or won’t figure out how many of its school children are in the hands of abductors.

•Okey Ndibe, a Nigerian writer and academic based in the USA, originally published this articlein The Guardian of London under vthe headline, 'Nigeria: Why are we sleeping easy when terrorists have kidnapped our children?' Photo by Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters shows man weeping as he joins parents of the kidnapped school girls during a meeting with Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima in Chibok on April 22. Follow Okey Ndibe on Twitter @okeyndibe

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