As a software engineering student, I spend a lot of time thinking about systems how they're built, how they fail, and how they recover. This week, Nigeria's stock market gave me a masterclass. The Crash The Central Bank introduced a new rule limiting bank investments in foreign subsidiaries. Within hours, the market lost ₦1.92 trillion. Banking stocks collapsed. Panic spread. One regulatory change. One massive system failure. In software terms, this is a single point of failure—one component that, when it breaks, brings down the entire system. The Recovery The next day, the market regained ₦1.71 trillion. The same banks. The same fundamentals. The only thing that changed was sentiment. In system design, we call this eventual consistency—a distributed system's ability to return to a correct state after a disruption, as long as the underlying data remains intact. The Real Lesson But here's what most people missed. Beneath the daily swings, something deeper was happening.…