Make Nigeria Great Again

Most people from the 1980s generation have quietly abandoned the "Nigerian dream," and it is hard to blame them. We inherited a lot: colonial extractive systems, two long stretches of military rule between 1966 and 1999, and a civil war that never fully healed. But inheritance only explains the starting point. It does not explain why, decade after decade, we keep choosing the same path.

The honest answer is that Nigeria has underperformed. Not relative to some utopian ideal, but relative to countries that started where we started and faced what we faced. If we want a different outcome, we have to be willing to say that plainly, look at the evidence, and then do the slow work of building institutions.

The evidence is not flattering

Compare us to our peers using the one number that captures standard of living — GDP per capita — and the picture is uncomfortable.

In the early 1980s, Nigeria and Brazil were roughly as prosperous as each other. That parity has since vanished. Closer to home, Ghana quietly overtook us around 2016 to 2017. We had a genuine run of growth between 1999 and 2014, and then a sharp decline that we have not recovered from.

Indonesia is the comparison that should keep us up at night. It faced the same obstacles we did — corruption, a weak currency, a large population, widespread poverty — and today it produces roughly three times our output per person and sits among the world's sixteen largest economies. We once outpaced our sub-Saharan neighbours. Now we are being overtaken as regional powers emerge around us.

The last decade in particular shows how little ground we have gained. Standard-of-living growth has stalled, and what growth there was benefited a narrow few rather than the society as a whole.

Prosperity is built on institutions

Samuel Huntington defined institutions as "stable, valued, recurring patterns of behaviour."¹ That is the whole game. Nigeria needs rules that hold regardless of who is in the room — rules that outrank tribe, personal finance, and influence, and that put collective welfare first.

Institutional weakness is why our outrage is episodic. A hashtag movement erupts almost weekly — #EndSARS, #SayNoToRape, #Gandollar, #BringBackOurGirls — burns brightly, and then fades without producing any durable change to the system that provoked it. Anger is not reform. Reform is when the pattern of behaviour itself changes.

That change has to begin at the foundation of society: families, religious bodies, and community institutions. The next generation needs values that place the common good above personal enrichment, alongside a working sense of justice, equality, and fairness.

Politicians shape institutions more than anyone, especially economic ones. We have had extractive leadership from colonisation through to the present. Extractive politicians produce extractive economies that serve only the political elite, which feeds the "what's in it for me?" reflex and the habit of voting for popularity over character. That cycle is now deep in the national psyche, and it has to be reversed. Building an environment where entrepreneurs and businesses can thrive is one of the few things that reliably breaks it, because it changes the incentives that select our leaders.

Where to focus: measure what drives productivity

Since 2004, the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index has tracked the institutions, policies, and conditions that determine sustainable prosperity. The Forum describes it as "an annual yardstick for policy-makers to look beyond short-term and reactionary measures and to instead assess their progress against the full set of factors that determine productivity."²

The index organises those factors into twelve pillars:

1. Institutions
2. Infrastructure
3. ICT adoption
4. Macroeconomic stability
5. Health
6. Skills
7. Product market
8. Labour market
9. Financial system
10. Market size
11. Business dynamism
12. Innovation capability

Our ranking tells a familiar story: a steady decline from 2007 to 2017, everything crashing in 2010, a failed recovery attempt in 2012, and modest gains in 2018 to 2019 that still left us at 116 while Ghana reached 111.

Leadership should identify the handful of pillars where we underperform most, set targets against them, and manage the work the way any serious organisation would — with objectives, key results, and dashboards published on a public portal so citizens can watch progress in real time. What gets measured, in public, gets done.

Ten places to start

Reading the competitiveness data against those twelve pillars, the near-term opportunities are concrete:

1. Agree and secure public consensus on a long-term national vision.
2. Strengthen property rights.
3. Improve protection of intellectual property.
4. Fix land administration.
5. Expand e-government capability.
6. Rework school curricula to build critical thinking.
7. Promote science and technology education from the earliest years.
8. Reform worker protections and labour law.
9. Widen private-sector access to credit.
10. Deploy technology for insurance compliance and police enforcement.

None of these are glamorous. All of them compound.

This is not a partisan failure

The past decade is a failure of leadership by both major parties, and it is bigger than either of them. The whole nation has underperformed, and the whole nation needs rebuilding for the generation coming after us.

That only happens if we are willing to assess ourselves honestly, admit that the current approach is not working, and demand — at local, state, and federal level — that mediocrity and incompetence stop being rewarded. Strong institutions are not built by hashtags or elections alone. They are built by the patient, unglamorous insistence that the rules apply to everyone, every time.

Originally published in Pulse, June 2020.

Footnotes

1. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies. ↩

2. World Economic Forum, The Global Competitiveness Report 2019. ↩