Restore federalism and enlist the diaspora
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with 230 million of the continent’s 1.3 billion people and until recently the continent’s largest economy, is failing at a task many Africans have long believed to be a “natural” role for the West African country: leading Africa to prosperity and global influence, much as China has done for itself and for Asia over the past four decades.
In the halcyon days of the 1970s and 1980s during the Cold War, as Africa struggled to free its last set of European colonies such as Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe and the global movement against Apartheid in South Africa rose to a crescendo, Nigeria played a decisive leadership role that determined outcomes. The country was firmly recognized as a second-order global power and Africa’s diplomatic powerhouse.
While Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth is not necessarily the same thing as human development, Nigeria has fallen from a GDP of USD 500 billion in 2014, which made it Africa’s biggest economy, to USD 252 billion in 2024, according to the International Monetary Fund. This leaves Nigeria now in fourth place, behind South Africa (USD 373 billion), Egypt (USD 347 billion) and Algeria (USD 266 billion).
The country is buffeted today by an economic meltdown as the cost of living has skyrocketed owing to economic reforms by the government of President Bola Tinubu that were necessary and had long been delayed, but were hastily and incompetently executed, thus exacerbating their harsh impact on ordinary Nigerians. These reforms consist mainly of the removal of subsidies on petrol and electricity, and the unification of the country’s previously multiple foreign exchange rates which resulted in a steep devaluation of the Naira currency.
Today, life is difficult in what was once Africa’s proudest country. In addition to an inflation rate of nearly 35%, poverty rates, now at 40% according to the World Bank, have remained high for many years. There appears to be little hope of a significant reprieve in the short term. In 1960, when Nigeria obtained independence from Britain, the country was at par, in terms of development indices, with countries such as Malaysia and South Korea. Some projections forecasted that it would overtake Japan in economic development. Such was the potential.
What happened to Nigeria’s promise? And can that promise be restored, or better still, realized? The answers to the first question are clear. Those to the second depend on whether the Nigerian state and its citizens can come to grips with, and resolutely address, the answers to the first.
Even in its immediate neighborhood of West Africa, Nigeria’s writ is no longer unquestioned. Military coups have recently occurred in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali over the West African Big Brother’s objections, and recalcitrant military leaders of these regimes have exited the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the sub-region’s economic grouping, defying Nigeria’s suasion. Nigeria has half of the sub-region’s population of 458 million people and a quarter of the region’s nominal GDP of USD 800 billion.
INTERNAL REASONS FOR DECLINE
The truth is that Nigeria’s current distress, and even its relative historical decline, was foreseeable. While it is tempting to look at its challenges from a mainly economic lens, and perhaps even interpret it by shifting significant responsibility to global economic cycles of commodity prices, and to wars such as that in Ukraine and their inflationary impact, the reality is that Nigeria’s decline has stemmed from within. And it is fundamentally political and structural. It is the weakness of the country’s political foundations – and that of a political elite of progressively diminished vision and quality – that has metastasized, over decades, into today’s long-running security challenges from terrorism, economic distress, and a decline in diplomatic prestige.
Nigeria was the outcome, in 1914, of the amalgamation by British colonialists of a predominantly Christian Southern Protectorate and a predominantly Muslim Northern Protectorate. While such disparate cultures and mindsets were bound to make eventual nationhood a challenging proposition – of the type solved in India at independence in 1947 by the peaceful Partition of a mainly Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan into two separate countries – there is also nothing to say that, with an appropriate constitutional structure and visionary leadership, Nigeria could not have managed to achieve internal stability.
But it was always going to be difficult. Given the precedent of India and Pakistan, it is intriguing that the same colonial power took a different approach in Nigeria’s case.
At independence in 1960, Britain bequeathed political power in Nigeria to Northern politicians. They and Southern politicians have jostled for power ever since, with the former – or Northern soldiers in the era of more than 30 years of military rule since 1966 (with a brief interregnum of civilian democracy from 1979 to 1983) -- ruling Nigeria for 40 of the country’s 64 years of independence. To manage the challenge of ethnic and religious identity politics that had already established itself in the nascent republic, the British colonizers bequeathed a political system of federalism, recommended and practiced in pluralistic countries such as Canada, India and United States.
However, when military leaders seized power in 1966, they abrogated the federalist constitution and introduced a unitary government. The notion of a real federalism has remained weak ever since, even after the return to democracy in 1999. With so much power concentrated in the central government in Abuja, politics in Nigeria is, in reality, mostly a food fight over which ethnic identity will control the federal government and enjoy its spoils system. Nigeria is a country whose potential is difficult to attain because it lacks internal cohesion, a gap created by the absence of a widely shared sense of nationhood.
Add to this conundrum Nigeria’s “resource curse”. From the early 1970s, a country that previously relied on the export of raw agricultural produce – cocoa, groundnuts and palm oil – for its revenues, now experienced an “oil boom”. This was to have a fundamentally distorting effect on the economy and on politics. The country’s leaders have failed, to date, to diversify the country’s foreign currency export earnings in the same manner as some other resource-based economies such as Chile and Malaysia were able to, over time.
Crude oil sales account for 90 per cent of foreign exchange earnings. This has left Nigeria negatively exposed to the boom-and-bust cycles of global commodity markets, with destructive consequences for fiscal management. The focus of politics, especially since the return of democracy in 1999, has progressively been a struggle for control and patronage from economic rents by a broadly corrupt political elite. The upshot is an increasingly immiserated population that is yet to reap significant development dividends from democracy.
This narrow focus on sectarian infighting for political power and the political rewards system, in which the real task of transformative governance ranks as a low priority, has led to a corrosive decline in leadership quality and technocratic competence in statecraft – national security, economic management, international diplomacy, and basic public administration to provide social services.
CREATING A STABLE NATIONHOOD
Nigeria also has for decades believed – wrongly, I argue – that its large population (projected to reach 400 million by 2050 and making it the world’s third most populous country, after India and China) will always make it relevant and influential in the world. But the country has failed, unlike China and increasingly, India, to turn its demographic strength into a skilled and productive economic workforce. With nearly 20 million school-age children out of school, Nigeria has the highest such numbers in the world. Unless this trend is reversed, and its population explosion countered and reversed, the country will be breeding millions of potentially unproductive youths.
Despite these obstacles, it’s not all gloom. Nigeria does have the capacity to rise to true greatness – or at least a return to the kind of regional clout it wielded decades ago. To do so, it must be strong at home before it can become powerful abroad. This means that creating a stable, cohesive nationhood must be an urgent priority. Without this, it will remain difficult for Nigeria’s democracy to yield development and prosperity for its citizens.
The country must therefore confront the difficult and politically sensitive task of creating a people-driven constitution that restores real federalism, preferably along regional lines, and the attendant marked devolution of powers that has driven the progress of so many successful federations. The inescapable conversations, debates, negotiations and consensus that the process of creating a new constitution will bring are critical to forging a much-needed nationhood.
The path to fixing Nigeria’s malaise of low productivity, high inflation and a debt overhang is to first fix the problem of governance by achieving the right balance between it and politics through independent institutions. And to achieve this, in turn, the country’s democracy, marked by chronic election-rigging and vote buying, must be reformed to strengthen the integrity and transparency of the electoral process. Only this will allow Nigerians to elect the kind of politicians that can possibly deliver the goods. In a long journey of reversing decline, this is perhaps the essential first step.
The Nigerian diaspora, one of the most successful in the western world and in other African countries, need to be engaged in national rebirth, just as Non-Resident Indians and the Chinese diaspora have been. Specific, workable diaspora return or engagement programs in which these talented Nigerians – who send home USD 20 billion annually in remittances – contribute their skills to areas such as health, education, skill development, and venture capital will be impactful.
FEATS OF INNOVATION
So will engaging Nigeria’s young people – 70% of the population is under 30. They are highly talented in the arts, innovation, and technology. Nigeria’s technology hubs are among the most active in Africa, and feats of innovation are the norm. What Nigeria’s tech innovators need is a wider innovation ecosystem that includes not just finance, but the commercialization and mainstreaming of the products of innovation, as well as effective intellectual property protections.
The past is not destiny. Nigeria can rebound to its natural leadership role in Africa. But no one should underestimate the fundamental nature of the fix that is needed. Anything else is self-delusion. For an increasingly fragile country, the more this fundamental fix is kicked down the road, the greater the cumulative but avoidable damage that will occur.
