Nigeria is trapped in a loop: we begin, we forget, we repeat. 

Fuel subsidies, devaluations, protests, debt relief, palace scandals. Every few years, the cycle returns. Leaders and their slogans change, but the patterns repeat. Context scarcity forces us to relearn the same lessons again and again.

This vacuum is precisely why Archivi.ng exists. We find archival materials that hold this context, we digitise them, make them accessible, and help people make sense of them. 

Since Archivi.ng went live in 2023, something has been happening on our Twitter. Something happens somewhere in Nigeria—say, a flood—then we go deep into the archives and return with a story from decades ago, mirroring the same struggle. A union threatens a strike in 2025; we dig up a similar headline from two decades prior. Over and over. Sometimes, we publish an essay about these patterns or make a video. Making sense and connections in small doses. But it’s never felt enough. 

Each time we tweeted one of those connections between the past and the present, one message continued to come back in the comments, said differently, but echoing the same sentiment: The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same. It’s why we’ve chosen The More Things Change as our rallying idea for our next great adventure. 

The More Things Change is our two-year project interrogating the cycles of repetition in the Nigerian experience. We’ll gather evidence, connect the patterns, and equip people with memory as a tool for fostering change. We want people to see the loop more clearly and break it. 

Running from January 2026 to December 2027, The More Things Change will build a body of evidence, a community of practice, and an engine that makes our collective memory easier to retrieve and harder to forget. We'll find virtuous cycles that deserve to be reinforced; we'll find vicious ones that have trapped us and must be broken. 

Over the two-year period, our work will revolve around three levers: 

• We'll build a Body of Work that includes but is not limited to story projects, datasets, white papers, and evidence that moves patterns from hearsay and rumours to record. 
• We'll build a Community of Practice that includes our fellows, students, journalists, researchers, knowledge workers, and the active public. 
• We'll build an Engine that expands the size of our digitised collections, improves information discovery, and provides infrastructure that makes memory ridiculously easy to find, compare, and share.

The More Things Change is an urgent initiative. Archives continue to deteriorate at a faster rate than we can preserve them. Elders pass on every day, taking with them entire lifetimes of memory and experiences that were never written down. Every loss widens the vacuum. 

Nigeria is at a pivotal point across multiple dimensions, from policies to the seemingly small aspects of our daily lives. Without memory, we risk falling into the same ditches again and again. The More Things Change is a refusal to forget and a firm belief in memory as a form of infrastructure. 

We’re tracking progress across our three levers with these outputs: 

• Execute 2 Fellowship Cohorts; one per year. 
• Publish 8 Issues of The Archivist, our quarterly publication obsessed with making sense of history. 
• Build a community of 1,000 student researchers spread across the breadth of Nigeria.
• Record 10,000 hours of Oral History from elders and make them available for research
• Digitise 2 million pages of archival materials. 

This is not Archivi.ng’s work alone. It belongs to everyone who wants to understand, classrooms that want to teach, journalists who want to tell comprehensive stories,  policymakers who want to govern with context—everyone who is discontent with Nigeria’s cycles of repetition. 

We begin, we forget, we repeat—well, until we choose to remember.