This article was originally published on Medium by Editi Effiong.

"If you stepped of out your home in the morning and discovered that the 10 minutes of rain you had last night had flooded your compound and street, do you call the Fire Service to come rescue you and your family, while waiting for the Works Department to unblock the drainage and…wait, I’m just kidding, which Fire Service?"

Everyone in Nigeria has heard or experienced the phrase “Manage It Like That”. Except you have just dropped out of the abroad into Nigerian airspace, it is virtually impossible to have regular interaction with Nigerians over the course of 24 hours without interacting with this phrase, either verbally or in action.

If you are the 'lucky' human who just fell into the Nigerian airspace, and on account of that have never experienced “Manage It Like That”, introductions are in order. If it’s night in the sky, look over the city you’re about to land on. Is there light? No? You will have to learn to manage it like that. If it’s daytime, it’s only fair to warn you that the motif of dirty roofs you just saw on the outside borders of the mega city you’re about to make an acquaintance with is not an an art project. Na there we dey live. Manage it like that.

If you slept through your flight and missed the welcome in the last paragraph, well, prepare for the smell as you emerge from the plane into our terminal. It’s terrible, a mixture of fermented urine, unclean toilets and humans with selective interactions with baths — the smell is almost toxic. But you will not die, nobody does. Just manage. Welcome to Naija.

MILT- THE DEFINITION

Manage It Like That (MILT) is a Nigerian phrase that expresses the heart and soul of service delivery in Nigeria. It means "take it as you see it", and it means just that. The word ‘manage’ implies “this isn’t ideal, we know, but by all means make do, because we’re not about offering a substitute”.

Did you order food from the restaurant and got a wrong order? Sorry. But you can’t be so wicked as to expect the poor restaurant to absorb the loss and replace your order. Just manage. It’s not like you’ll die eating fried rice instead of the jollof rice you ordered. Rice is rice, please.

You’re used to Uber in other countries. Nice clean vehicles, friendly drivers. Well, welcome to the Nigerian Uber. It’s not clean, but come on, it’s not that dirty. Manage! "What is that smell?" "Oh, it’s a goat in the trunk, for the family party tomorrow. It just got picked up" "What? You are going to give me 1-star? Don’t you eat goat? You’re just wicked. And you call yourself a religious person. Are you the first person? Can’t you manage?"

I believe you get the picture.

Now let's talk about the MILT Index. MILT Index is a measure of the average periodic exposure to MILT within a location. It ranges from 0–100; where 0 = excellent and 100=terrible.

To understand how MILT Index works, let’s take a look at Singapore; a country where things just work. Things work so well in that country that the people don’t have much to complain about. They really don’t need to manage much, their MILT Index would be about 0.8. Not even up to 1.

Now, if you’re in a war zone, you have to make a lot of compromises. This means people in the war-torn areas of Syria will have a MILT Index in the region of 95.

There is also the MILT Acceptance Value (MAV), which is the amount of MILT a person is ready to accept. While this is generally related to the MILT Index, its a value of its own. People from countries higher on the MILT Index are likely to have high MAVs, because they can’t come and kill themselves. But because this is a personal value, there are sometimes people who choose not to take nonsense, so they have lower MAVs. Those people are special of course.

It could be argued that the average Oyinbo person has low MAV because they grew up in countries with lower MILT Index, whereas, the average Nigerian has a high MAV, because our MILT Index is exceptionally high (about 98/100). The higher the MILT Index where you come from, the higher your chances of having a high MAV. It also means that the higher the MAVs of people in a country, the higher their score on the MILT Index