Seen Everywhere, Trusted Nowhere: Expose on Nigeria’s Global Image Crisis

Nigeria is visible everywhere – in culture, commerce and conversation. Yet, trusted nowhere enough. The recent unveiling of the Nigeria Reputation Perception Index 2025 at the National Assembly in Abuja, exposes a troubling paradox of a nation bursting with influence and promise, but constrained by credibility deficits that continue to weaken its political authority and global standing. Sunday Aborisade reports.

Nigeria today stands at a critical crossroads in its relationship with the world. Loud, visible, culturally magnetic and impossible to ignore, Africa’s most populous nation nevertheless struggles with a credibility deficit that continues to undermine its vast potential. This contradiction, a country rich in talent, influence and opportunity, yet constrained by low global trust, sits at the heart of the inaugural Nigeria Reputation Perception Index (NRPI) 2025, a landmark report that has injected fresh data, urgency and clarity into the long-running debate about Nigeria’s global standing.

Unveiled in Abuja at a well attended ceremony under the chairmanship of the Deputy Senate President, Senator Jibrin Barau, by the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) in collaboration with Reputation Perception Services (RPS), the NRPI 2025 is the first systematic, evidence-based attempt to measure how Nigeria is perceived by both its citizens and international stakeholders.

Seven years in the making, the index moves the conversation on national reputation away from anecdote, emotion and propaganda into the realm of data, structure and accountability.

Its headline finding is sobering: Nigeria scored 35.2 per cent, placing the country firmly in a low-trust reputation band. For a nation of Nigeria’s scale, resources and cultural reach, the score exposes a profound disconnect between potential and credibility, a paradox that policymakers, investors and diplomats can no longer afford to ignore.

Crucially, the NRPI is not a verdict on any single administration or reform programme. Rather, it is a broader assessment of Nigeria as a country, its institutions, leadership signals, delivery capacity and social contract, as experienced and interpreted by people at home and abroad.

The index evaluates perceptions across seven pillars: Leadership, Performance, Credibility, Communication, Innovation, Social Equity and Culture. Together, they form a composite picture of how trust is built, sustained or eroded over time.

While the report acknowledges policy initiatives and reform efforts undertaken in recent years, particularly in economic management, digital innovation and institutional restructuring, it notes that reputation operates on a longer time horizon.

Unlike perception, which can shift quickly, reputation is cumulative, requiring consistency, delivery and credibility across years, not months. In effect, Nigeria’s challenge is not visibility. It is trust execution.

Perhaps the most striking insight from the NRPI 2025 is the uneven performance across the seven pillars. Culture emerged as Nigeria’s strongest asset, with a score of 48.7 per cent, underscoring the country’s immense soft power. From music and film to fashion, sports and literature, Nigeria continues to shape global conversations, particularly among younger audiences.

Nollywood, the report stated, remains one of the world’s largest film industries. Nigerian creatives, professionals and entrepreneurs are visible across continents. In terms of cultural influence, Nigeria punches far above its weight.

Yet this visibility has not translated into trust.

Credibility, the pillar most closely associated with confidence in governance and institutions, recorded a troubling 28.1 per cent, the lowest score in the index. Performance, innovation and communication also remained under pressure, reinforcing scepticism among both domestic and international audiences.

The implication is clear: while Nigeria’s story is widely heard, it is not consistently believed.

The report indicates that persistent global media narratives focused on insecurity, corruption, policy inconsistency and systemic weaknesses which continue to overshadow gains in entrepreneurship, technology and cultural diplomacy. Even when positive developments occur, it added, fragmented communication and weak institutional follow-through blunt their reputational impact.

The NRPI also exposes a notable 9.6-point gap between domestic and international perceptions, suggesting that global audiences judge Nigeria more harshly than its own citizens do. This gap matters.

In a world where capital, tourism, partnerships and diplomatic influence are increasingly shaped by perception-driven decisions, external trust deficits carry tangible costs. Poor reputation raises borrowing costs, deters long-term investment, complicates visa regimes and weakens a country’s negotiating leverage,  even when its policy positions are sound.

As a former ambassador and President of the Association of Retired Career Ambassadors of Nigeria, Joe Keshi, warned at the unveiling, “In today’s world, capital follows confidence and credibility, not noise.”

That message was echoed by the Deputy President of the Senate, Senator JibrinBarau, who described the NRPI unveiling as a watershed moment in Nigeria’s governance journey.

He argued that reputation is no longer about sentiment or image laundering but a strategic national asset with direct implications for economic opportunity, diplomacy and social cohesion.

The ranking Senator said, “Reputation is evidence, experience and trust. Countries that deliberately manage their reputation are better positioned to compete globally,”

For Barau, “the index offers more than a diagnosis, it provides a compass for policy reform, institutional accountability and national reorientation.

“Leadership quality, policy consistency, institutional integrity and citizens’ daily experiences all feed into the reputational ecosystem”.

In this sense, reputation management is not the job of public relations professionals alone. It is a whole-of-government and whole-of-society project.

For the President of NIPR, Dr Ike Neliaku,

the Institute’s greatest contribution lies in shifting the reputation conversation from assumption to measurement.

Drawing on global benchmarks such as the Edelman Trust Barometer, Canada’s RepTrak system and South Africa’s reputation framework, the index establishes a credible baseline against which progress, or regression, can be tracked.

Neliaku said, “This is not just a report; it is a national capability. Reputation is an economic instrument. It takes decades to build and can be destroyed in seconds. That is why it must be governed like revenue.”

His observation that Nigerians themselves remain widely admired abroad, for professionalism, resilience and warmth, underscores another dimension of the paradox. Nigeria’s people often enjoy goodwill that the state has failed to convert into structured economic and diplomatic capital.

Technically, the NRPI is anchored on the Reputation Perception Index (ROPI) Framework, which identifies leadership as the most heavily weighted pillar, accounting for 17 per cent of the overall score. Leadership signals direction, stability and intent. But intent alone is insufficient.

Performance, credibility, innovation and communication form what the report describes as the delivery block, the mechanism through which leadership promises are tested in real life. When delivery falters, trust erodes. When communication is inconsistent or disconnected from verifiable outcomes, scepticism deepens.

Social equity and culture provide foundational legitimacy and soft power, but as the report makes clear, visibility without delivery does not generate trust.

The NRPI 2025 should not be read as a condemnation of Nigeria, but as a wake-up call. Its value lies not in the 35.2 per cent score alone, but in what that score reveals, and what it makes possible.

For policymakers, the index offers an evidence base for aligning reforms with reputational outcomes. For investors, it provides a clearer lens for understanding perception gaps. For the media, it challenges the dominance of single-story narratives. For development partners, it supplies data to inform engagement strategies.

Most importantly, for citizens, it reframes national reputation as something shaped by lived realities, not slogans.

The promise by NIPR and RPS to release the NRPI annually is significant. Reputation, after all, is dynamic. Tracking progress year-on-year will allow Nigeria to see whether reforms translate into trust, and whether communication aligns more closely with outcomes.

Nigeria’s hosting of the 2026 World Public Relations Forum in Abuja, according to the NIPR boss, presents a strategic opportunity because it would bring practitioners from over 126 countries to Nigeria offering a rare chance to project realities directly to global opinion leaders, not through spin, but through engagement, openness and evidence.

Ultimately, Nigeria’s reputation challenge is not about telling a better story. It is about becoming a more credible one. High visibility is already assured. What remains is the harder work of consistency, delivery and institutional trust-building.

In an interconnected world where reputation increasingly determines opportunity, Nigeria can no longer afford the comfort of potential alone. The NRPI 2025 has held up the mirror. Whether the country chooses to act on what it sees may well define its place on the global stage in the years ahead.