Continuing that conversation on why Nigeria’s monthly minimum wage was $2,419 in 1981 but now $37. I was still in secondary school when he was the president, but over time, I have studied what he did. I do conclude that Nigeria’s IBB (Babangida) was a good operator even though he scaled many bad things. I mean he built Abuja, 3rd Mainland Bridge, etc. Yet, he messed up with SAP (structural adjustment programme), and in a bid to recover, he liberated the banking & financial sector at scale, without connecting them to making things in Nigeria.
Today, from GTBank to Zenith Bank, Access to modern UBA, and beyond, some of the leading banks in Nigeria were created within 1989 and 1993. Just like that, the financialization of Nigeria began, and the nation began to fade.
The illusion has been that the late 1970s and early 1980s were great because we had the oil boom. Not really, as we still have an oil boom today. In the 1980s, we pumped about 400,000 bpd at about $36 per barrel. Today, we do close to 1.2 million bpd at close to $80 per barrel . Even if you adjust for population, Nigeria has more resources today than the late 1970s! [Under constant US dollar, we made $14.4m daily vs $96m today (6.7 factor). Population in 1981 was 75m for today’s 210m ( 2.3x). In other words, we have scaled oil revenue faster than population, meaning the boom of today is greater].
So, do not say the late 1970s and early 1980s were better because of oil. Simply, Nigeria’s problem is not that oil money has stopped; our problem is that post the 1980s SAP, our economy was reconfigured and people found out that you could invest N1,000 and wait for a 20% return without doing anything. With that financial engineering everywhere, everyone joined the club and starved the manufacturing (old, modern, hybrid and services) sector. Of course, with easy money, productivity dropped, corruption demons grew, and a nation began the descent https://lnkd.in/ecXSiGxY