Check most faded ancestral kingdoms, they failed not because of lack of resources, rather, due to the poor utilization of their people. Typically, the people become enterprising, build wealth and after passing an inflection point, they pause – and lose their minds. Over time, another kingdom takes over.
As early as 1961, most European countries have written out any support to Nigeria because they saw a nation with a dynamic and pragmatic agricultural policy which if built upon could make it a respected nation in the world. In Belgium, they argued that any financial help to Nigeria was stupidity as the nation was already in a virtuoso cycle to greatness. Unfortunately, that did not happen and has not happened. Let me take you to economic systems for why:
Country A generates aggregate economic output (GDP) via agriculture of $5 billion but employs 1 million doing that. But it does not have a lot of money, just $0.5 billion, in the foreign reserves.
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Country B generates output of $1 billion via crude oil sector but employs 100,000 people doing it. But it has $20 billion in foreign reserves from the sale of the oil.
Many people will say that Country B is in a better shape. Possibly, if that $20 billion is not mismanaged or stolen. But structurally, Country A has a stronger positioning provided it can keep getting more productive. It has found a way to employ its 1 million citizens and it has a decent reserve.
In Country B, the citizens are under stress with largely zero economic participation, implying that risk is concentrated on what leaders do with that $20 billion. When you have bad leaders, you have the Nigerian case. When you have better ones, you have UAE (Dubai).
This explains why Nigeria has 133 million extremely poor people despite having earned $741.48bn from oil & gas in 21 years. The curse of oil is not that oil is bad. The curse is that you can be partying in Abuja, drinking kunu, eating nkwobi and amala, and your bank balance will be growing in New York via oil sales. But when you look around, only few are in that party with the majority dying of the real curse: poverty in a land of plenty.
A National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) report has revealed that 63% of persons living in Nigeria (133 million people) are multidimensionally poor: “65% of the poor (86 million people) live in the North, while 35% (nearly 47 million) live in the South. Poverty levels across States vary significantly, with the incidence of multidimensional poverty ranging from a low of 27% in Ondo to a high of 91% in Sokoto.”
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Let’s put things in proper perspective, since we are in a country where noise trumps intellectual discourse, with everyone claiming to have answers to the malaise.
Nigeria is very large, both in population and landmass, that comes with its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage ranges from possibility of having large talent pool and land resources, and the disadvantage? When that large population is not productive, and with a large landmass to service, they become a recipe for catastrophe.
From available data, we are over 200 million, with over 35000km federal roads, the roads aren’t even enough, but we have a base of 35000km, for a start. Even if we produce 10 million barrels of oil per day, it won’t be enough to keep our population happy and productive, because you don’t need 2 million people to produce 10 million barrels; how do you keep the remaining 198M productive? Therein lies our biggest conundrum.
Many countries are not even the size of Niger State, both in population and landmass, so imagine deploying all our current wealth to develop only Niger State? That would make it envy of many nations!
One candidate has a mantra of ‘Consumption to Production’, with vast lands in the north as springboard. Think about it…
When the Wealth of a nation is not distributed amongst it’s citizens, instead it is hoarded amongst the ruling class that values extravagant life style, dictatorship style of rule with little to no tolerance for criticism, human capital development and poor infrastructure development coupled with a clear lack of economic ideology and respect fore human life and deep deprivation of the fundamental human rights, the result is multidimensional poverty, high crime rate, deterioration of society and negative societal values. Such is the case of Nigeria.