On the first of August, the United States quietly redirected routine visa processing away from Abuja to regional hubs across Nigeria — a bureaucratic adjustment that carries an outsized lesson about the fragility of economies built on narrow foundations. The embassy in Abuja remains open, its diplomatic mission intact, but the steady stream of applicants who once filled hotel rooms, hired taxis, and patronized local restaurants will now spend those naira elsewhere. It is not a crisis, but it is a mirror: cities that anchor their prosperity to a single source of activity discover its value most