By Yakubu Aboki Ochefu
Protocols, Provocations, and a Personal Debt
Today, we celebrate Dr Chido Onumah, who turns 60. A substantial part of his life’s work has been built on a simple but powerful premise: that this country is negotiable. Not negotiable in a weak but in a deep sense. He believes that the current architecture of our federal republic is a contested inheritance that needs a structural reset. One that will move it from being just a corporate entity to becoming a genuine republic. Chido and I drank from the same intellectual well at the University of Calabar in the mid-1980s. At that time, a radical collective called the Calabar Group of Socialists existed. The group was chaired by Eskor Toyo, one of Nigeria’s greatest thinkers and ideologues, and one of the earliest Nigerian theoreticians to interrogate the nature and character of the Nigerian ruling class as an emerging capitalist ruling class. We also had the Democratic Action Committee. Dacom, popularly known as, was led by Eddie and Bene Madunagu and bridged the gap between the seminar room and the street. Comrade Professor Akpan Ekpo grounded our idealism in the hard data of economic analysis and structural underdevelopment. Veteran journalist Bassey Ekpo Bassey, Comrade Asim Ita, Ebony Okpa, and James Crentsil were the key drivers of the group. The vibrant environment in Calabar produced a significant number of cadres from UNICAL, distinguished by a deep awareness and understanding of the “problem with Nigeria.” Chido is a product of that tradition—a youth activist who understood that the struggle for Nigeria was both political and intellectual. We came to understand that ideas matter and that a broken system cannot be dismantled unless you first understand the logic by which it was assembled.
And so, in his honour, let me attempt to do exactly that. Not as a polemicist, but as an economic historian, tracing the logic of how a commercial formation failed to become a national project, why the gaps in thinking persist, what must be done, and what will happen if it is not.
The Conceptual Trap: Formation Is Not Nation Building
Let me begin by clearing away a conceptual confusion that has plagued this conversation for decades. The question before us, formation or Nation-building, is, I submit, a false binary. But it is a revealing one, because it exposes the central error of Nigerian governance: the assumption that because the State was formed, the Nation was built. State formation, as we all know, is the act of creating a state by drawing boundaries, writing constitutions, and establishing territorial integrity. Nation-building, on the other hand, is the organic, far more difficult process of forging a shared civic identity, trust, and legitimacy across diverse groups. So while we completed the first exercise in 1960, our leadership has never seriously attempted the second in the past 65 years. To understand why this has not happened, we have to synchronise our thinking with the very foundations of our entity. The House that Taubman Goldie designed 140 years ago, and Lugard built, was not a residential one but a warehouse for its commodities. Between 1900 and 1910, when the British formalised imperial control through force, diplomacy, and fraudulent treaties and in 1914, when the three distinct territories were integrated, the intention was not to create a nation, but to create an economically viable entity, a commercial merger to balance a colonial budget. The word “amalgamation” itself is revealing. You amalgamate companies. You amalgamate assets.
You do not amalgamate people unless you see them as assets. Britain did not invent Nigeria as a nation; rather, it created Nigeria as a trading colony for economic extraction. The Royal Niger Company was a literal business charter. Together with six other companies, namely John Holt & Sons, Patterson and Zochonis (PZ), the two French companies, CFAO (Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale) and SCOA (Société Commerciale de l’Ouest Africain), Lever Brothers (later Unilever) and Bank of British West Africa (now First Bank), which provided financial services, were the cartel that drove the imperial impulse. Designed to last for 500 years, this structure suffered a major blow when two European wars engulfed the world between 1914 and 1919 and from 1939 to 1945.
The Political Economy of Decolonisation: Who Inherited What?
The period between 1945 and 1955 is the most critical decade for understanding Nigeria’s trajectory. The resolution of the Second World War had created two anti-colonial superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, both of which, from two different ideological perspectives, opposed colonialism. In the face of having to dismantle a platform conceived at the Berlin Conference of 1884 to last five hundred years in only sixty years, European imperialists in Africa faced three options. They could stay by force and call the bluff of the Americans and the Soviets, pack their bags and abandon their interests entirely, or negotiate a post-colonial structure that would be beneficial. In the settler colonies of Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Kenya, and Rhodesia, they chose to stay and fight. In the Belgian Congo’s concessionary colonies, they simply packed their bags and left. For the British trading colonies in West Africa, they chose a managed transition.
To echo Chido’s thoughts, Independence was negotiated with deliberately embedded structural traps in the final document. As it turned out, the transfer of power was one of custodianship from one set of managers to a triumvirate of Nationalists, Traditional rulers and Labour/student activists. The inheritors were drawn from a specific constellation of actors who had controlled the political space: Monarchs, Merchants, and Men of God. To these, the colonial encounter added Men of Labour and, fatefully, Men of War. The post-colonial period produced a fourth leg: Technocrats and Academics.
While they united to negotiate the British exit, they fragmented badly over what to do with their inheritance. At Independence, these inheritors faced questions that would determine the future of the nascent Nigerian State. From simple questions like ‘should we keep the colonial name and the Westminster constitution?’ to crucial questions like ‘must we westernise to modernise?’ or ‘should we prioritise education, agriculture, or industrialisation?’ The answers by the emerging ruling class were to stick to the imperial script and do all three, with mixed results. They disagreed on the National Development Plan, on the Census, creation of new regions and on a Plebicite. Simply put, our Post-colonial leaders inherited this corporate shell with no operating philosophy and have since tried to “imagine a nation” from a corporate blueprint using mega-infrastructure, performative nationalism, and grand foreign policy gestures. But as we very well know, you cannot build a nation on a balance sheet. You need a covenant. And we have never had one. We will return to this and the subject of the making of the capitalist ruling shortly.
System Crashes, the Oil Virus, and the Fatal Misalignment
Ladies and Gentlemen, let us imagine for a moment that Nigeria is a computer system. Our constitution is the operating system. The legislature is the software. The 230 million Nigerians are the hardware. What happens when you run a 1960 operating system on 2025 hardware? The obvious happens. The system crashes. Repeatedly. And that is precisely what has been happening. The first system crash came on January 15 1966. The military did not merely seize power; they stepped into a vacuum created by legislative failure. The suspension of parliament silenced a structured national conversation. For 29 of Nigeria’s 65 years of Independence, citizens lived under military decrees—orders from above replaced bills from among. An entire legislative culture was deleted from the national memory. In that vacuum, the military introduced what I call the Oil Virus. In 1960, agriculture accounted for sixty-four per cent of GDP; oil contributed virtually nothing. By 2024, oil accounted for eighty per cent of government revenue. The Udoji Commission of 1974 awarded a 100 per cent salary increase with no corresponding increase in productivity. The national conversation shifted from growing the pie to dividing the crude. Over ninety per cent of export earnings now come from one commodity, killing fiscal discipline, innovation, and inter-state trade.
Over time, this produced the central structural defect of the Nigerian State: a misalignment between the structures of power and identity. Power is national and centralised in Abuja, while identity is profoundly sub-national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and geo-cultural. Nigerians first see themselves as Idoma, Ijaw, Kanuri, Yoruba, Hausa, or Igbo before they see themselves as Nigerians. The flag, the anthem, and the green-white-green are acquired patriotism and not organic allegiance. I saw this firsthand at the 2014 National Conference. Afenifere arrived with a regional map that included Lagos, and delegates from Lagos declared they would rather be their own country. Ebonyi rejected any Eastern Region headquartered in Enugu. Northern minorities demanded new states carved from Southern Kaduna, Southern Bauchi, and Southern Borno. The Kwararafa family revealed members in twenty-four states across five geopolitical zones—arguably the largest single body of people in the country, yet invisible in our national conversation.
What does this tell us? Nigeria is not two nations pretending to be one. It is hundreds of nations whose voices have been flattened into a false binary. It is a Federation of Memories rather than a Federation of Aspirations. Each group carries a different historical trauma. The North’s fear of educational and economic marginalisation, the South’s fear of political domination, and the Middle Belt’s Kwararafa-legacy struggle for distinct identity. Nation-building cannot happen until there is a sovereign conversation that acknowledges these divergent historical realities without trying to homogenise them. For example, we have a federal structure embedded in a unitary political logic. Power and revenue are hyper-centralised in Abuja, contradicting the spirit of the very federalism we profess. We have 36 state governments, but not 36 self-governing states.
The contemporary Nigerian reality is defined by what I call a Triple Paradox. An Economic Paradox where we are one of Africa’s largest economies, yet as of 2025, over 139 million citizens live in poverty, with more than half the population experiencing multidimensional deprivation. A Democratic Paradox: after twenty-five years of unbroken civilian rule, voter turnout in 2023 plummeted to 26.72 per cent, the lowest in the Fourth Republic. Out of 93.47 million registered voters, only 24.9 million cast ballots. The mandate of the presidency flows from less than ten per cent of the total electorate. In the southern zones, every region recorded a turnout of less than 25%. The third is a Generational Paradox. With a median age of eighteen and a political class averaging sixty-plus, we are running an analogue government for a digital generation. These paradoxes tell us that while the formation of the State is complete in a territorial sense, the building of the Nation remains an unfinished and increasingly precarious endeavour.
Beyond the Old Orthodoxy: New Thinking on What Ails Us
For decades, the discourse surrounding Nigeria’s challenges has remained trapped in familiar diagnoses: corruption, poor leadership, and the so-called’ oil curse’. While these explanations capture some of the symptoms, they fail to probe deeper into the underlying maladies. A new wave of scholarship is reframing the conversation, bringing structural, systemic, and psychological perspectives to the fore. This shift is essential if we are to understand not just what ails Nigeria, but why previous remedies have consistently missed the mark.
The first is the suggestion that Nigeria’s problem is not an excess of centralised power, but rather a debilitating fragmentation of authority. According to Zainab Usman, political power is scattered across a mosaic of ethnic, religious, and regional factions, preventing any one group from exerting sufficient influence to enact lasting structural reforms. Governments, therefore, find themselves locked in a cycle of short-term crisis management, not out of malice, but because the cost of deep reform in such a fractured system is prohibitively high. David Hundeyin adds another layer to this analysis, arguing that Nigeria lacks a genuine elite. Instead of a cohesive group that shapes the environment for its own long-term survival, Nigeria’s wealthy are driven by “poverty trauma” a mindset that prioritises personal security and escape over collective progress. The result is a predatory ruling class, more invested in evacuation plans than in development strategies. This raises a critical question: when even the highest authorities do not believe in the Nation they govern, what are the implications for national security?
Further complicating matters is what can be termed the Architecture of Distrust. While many analysts point to the 1914 Amalgamation as a geographic misstep, the deeper issue lies in Nigeria’s neglect of nation-building. The country has excelled at creating administrative structures like states, local governments, and federal agencies, but has failed to forge a genuine social contract. Unlike true federations, where constituent units create the centre, Nigeria’s centre “breathes life” into the states through monthly allocations, reducing them to administrative vassals. This Fiscal Paternalism, in which the federal government collects the lion’s share of revenues and distributes them through opaque formulas, turns states into mere tax collectors for Abuja rather than accountable, autonomous leaders. Finally, Nigeria faces a profound Citizenship Deficit. With over 250 ethnic groups navigating a political landscape that rewards bloc voting along ethnic and religious lines, true civic nationalism remains elusive. A Nigerian can be deemed a “non-indigene” in a state they have called home for decades. Nation-building demands that rights and opportunities flow from citizenship, not from ethnicity or State of origin. Until the indigene-settler divide is abolished and a single national identity is enforced, Nigeria risks remaining a Federation of Memories, a collection of communities bound by history rather than a shared future. A 2023 Brookings analysis describes Nigeria’s “anti-fragile” society where citizens generate at least double the electricity of the national grid and the diaspora thrives without state coordination. As Daniel Jordan Smith documented, every Nigerian household has become its own government. But the more citizens provide for themselves, the less pressure the state feels to deliver. Private ingenuity becomes a substitute for—and a barrier to—public good. Thus every generator you buy or a solar panel you erect is a vote of no confidence in the state.
These theoretical gaps demand new narratives. Moving beyond the tropes of corruption and the oil curse, Nigeria must confront the deeper structural and psychological challenges that have shaped its destiny. Only then can conversations shift from diagnosing symptoms to envisioning cures that address the root of the Nation’s enduring malaise.
Let me turn now to the political economy of Nigeria’s ruling class, as understanding its underlying logic is essential to changing it. In most capitalist societies, wealth is generated in the private sector and then used to shape political outcomes. Nigeria, however, operates on a reversed logic: here, political access is the chief factor of production. This system is often described as “Access Capitalism”, where the most effective business strategy is not innovation or competitive pricing, but gaining a seat at the table where licences, waivers, and government contracts are allocated. The key skill is not market mastery, but the ability to manoeuvre through bureaucratic channels and appropriate administratively generated rents. Nigeria’s ruling elite engage in policy capture. When market predictions are unreliable, they reshape the rules. This drive explains their pursuit of pioneer-status tax holidays, exclusive import licences, and sectoral monopolies. These tactics are fundamentally protective: by raising barriers to entry, the ruling class shields its capital from the creative destruction that fuels healthy capitalist economies. This behaviour is not unique to Nigeria; it reflects a broader pattern among emerging capitalist elites worldwide.
Within this class, many act as Compradors, linking international capital to local resources and favouring sectors with rapid returns such as oil and gas trading, telecoms and finance. Their approach is short-term extraction, not long-term industrialisation. They earn Naira from state-affiliated contracts and then preserve their wealth in hard foreign assets and overseas real estate, effectively severing their economic interests from Nigeria’s well-being. The outcome is a ruling class of Raiders, not Landowners. Whereas Landowners invest in and protect their estate for future generations, Raiders strip the land of its resources and move on. For 65 years, Nigeria’s ruling class has been raiding the forest, and now the forest stands nearly empty.
The Four Variables of Breakout Nations: What Must Be Done
Moving from diagnosis to prescription, historical evidence reveals that nations successfully escaping the development trap do so by aligning four key variables. These variables are crucial for sustained progress and for breaking out of stagnation. I will say nothing that you probably have not heard or read before.
First is a workable structure: Effective regional governance or substantial autonomy for federating units reduces the intense struggle for central control. Steps such as transferring items like railways, mines, prisons, and policing from the Exclusive to the Concurrent List can empower states. Allowing states to generate and retain at least half of their revenues fosters accountability and growth. Furthermore, replacing the “Federal Character” quota with merit-based selection and regional development funds ensures both fairness and progress.
Second, a sound strategy: transitioning from consumption-based federalism—where states compete to share oil revenue — to production-based federalism, where states strive to generate wealth, is imperative. When local elites depend on the prosperity of their own economies, their focus shifts from rent-seeking at the centre to investing in their communities, fostering genuine development.
Thirdly, is Competent leadership: The emphasis should move beyond familiar, recycled figures to leaders capable of achieving global standards in exploration and production. Transparent leadership, sending their children to Nigerian public schools, livestreaming committee meetings, and publishing monthly constituency expenditures build public trust and encourage accountability.
An ethically committed population completes the fourth leg: Addressing endemic corruption, which siphons off eighty per cent of contract sums, requires more than moral appeals. Incentive structures must be reformed so that mindsets change out of necessity rather than patriotism. Nigeria’s history of focusing on strategy through various “Visions” and “Agendas” while neglecting structure and leadership explains the lack of continuity, consistency, and commitment in development efforts. As Jonathan’s Transformation Agenda highlights, this gap has led to growth without tangible improvements in citizens’ welfare. By systematically aligning structure, strategy, leadership, and ethical commitment, Nigeria can lay the foundation for genuine progress and become a breakout nation.
The Elite Reset: Lessons from History
Throughout history, major resets by capitalist elites have rarely stemmed from altruism. Instead, such transformations are typically driven by existential threats, whether the spectre of revolution, looming military defeat, or the realisation that their economic model has reached a crisis point. Clear historical precedents illustrate this dynamic. For instance, during the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japanese samurai elites, facing the danger of Western colonisation, chose to abolish their own privileges and build an industrial state. In post-1945 West Germany, previously discredited industrialists accepted the Social Market Economy, recognising that fostering a prosperous middle class was essential for safeguarding their wealth. Likewise, in 1960s South Korea, General Park detained leading businessmen for illicit gains but offered their release and state backing in exchange for their commitment to developing industries to meet export targets. In 1930s America, amid a genuine revolutionary threat, President Roosevelt enacted high taxes on the wealthy, established Social Security, and empowered labour unions, famously claiming he was “saving capitalism from the capitalists.”
The consistent lesson from these episodes is that elites sometimes must relinquish some privileges to preserve their broader interests. Nigeria faces a similar crossroads today, as debt, insecurity, and the collapse of the oil-rent model threaten the status quo. The pressing question is whether these challenges are severe enough to push Nigerian elites to abandon Access Capitalism in favour of productive capitalism, or whether the comfort of rent extraction remains too alluring. Tim Akano’s formula captures this dilemma: T = EC³ + (D – C²) × i, where Transformation depends on Elite Consensus, Commitment, Capacity, Decentralisation, and the reduction of Corrosive Corruption. At present, each variable is in deficit.
Insecurity: The Desertification of the Forest
Nigeria’s most serious security challenge is not posed by any single militant group, but by the absence of a social contract. A state cannot be secure if its citizens lack faith in it. When the ruling class acts as raiders, extracting wealth and storing it abroad, they create a governance vacuum that inevitably leads to insecurity. In this context, insurgents and bandits emerge as informal raiders, filling the void left by formal raiders who have eroded the social contract. Thus, the root of Nigeria’s insecurity is the breakdown of trust between the State and its people, a problem that must be addressed for lasting stability.
Current Reforms: Debugging or Premature Surgery?; And a Frontier to Consider: The Property Verification Number
President Tinubu’s reforms must be assessed against the historical pattern. History teaches that reforms with buy-in succeed. The GSM revolution under Obasanjo is the clearest example. Reforms that bypass the legislature fail. And reforms that threaten entrenched elite interests without building a coalition for change are sabotaged. Is the fuel subsidy removal a debugging or premature surgery on an unstabilised patient? The student loan scheme—access or debt trap? The tax reforms—growing revenue or killing the goose? FAAC revenue increased 14.2 per cent in the first two months of 2026 compared to 2025, yet poverty indicators worsened. Between 2023 and 2024 alone, the macro-fiscal reforms pushed an estimated fifteen million more Nigerians into poverty. Nigeria’s total public debt is projected to exceed ₦180–₦200 trillion in 2026, driven by a planned ₦17.89 trillion budget deficit and intensified external borrowing. This is the paradox of reform without a social contract. You cannot ask citizens to bear the cost of transition when they have no stake in the destination. Yet, to move reforms beyond abstract promises, nation-building must hinge on technical infrastructure that empowers citizens and unlocks economic potential. Nigeria has successfully verified its citizens through the NIN, its financial accounts through the BVN, and its business entities through the CAC. However, land, the largest repository of wealth, remains unverified, leaving capital dormant. The failure to verify land is one of the reasons why a substantial pool of capital remains dead.
I propose that the “Modern Federal Republic” cannot exist on a foundation of dead capital. We must now move to the Property Verification Number, the PVN. In this regard, no property in Nigeria should be registered without being linked to the owner’s bank account, NIN, or international passport number. Just as many abandoned bank accounts after the BVN was introduced, a PVN would dismantle the shadow economy of anonymous property ownership that allows corrupt officials to hide assets. The Nigeria Tax Act 2025 provides the fiscal framework for this transition, consolidating federal tax laws and mandating TIN linkages. The PVN would be the biometric anchor of that act, ensuring that the person who pays the tax is the person who owns the title, and the person who owns the title is a verified citizen of this republic. Given the nature of the Land Use Act, our governors may face challenges with the proposed PVN and see it as a threat to their powers. In reality, however, it is a multiplier to their IGR. Our capitalists need to stop trading in anonymous portfolios. A PVN will protect investments from the raiders and “Omo-Oniles” who profit from the current chaos. If we can verify the person and verify the money, we must be able to verify the land. Only then do we move from a formation of temporary residents to a nation of vested landowners.
The Youth Question and the Digital Republic: Reimagining Nigeria’s Nation Building in the Age of the Homo Digitalis
Throughout Nigeria’s history, every significant democratic breakthrough has been driven by the energy and resolve of young people. From the 1930s West African Students’ Protests against colonialism in London, the 1961 Anti-Anglo-Nigerian Defence Pact protests, the massive 1978 “Ali Must Go” protests against tuition hikes, and the 1989 Anti-SAP riots, to the pro-democracy struggles of the 1990s—NADECO, June 12, and the EndSARS movement—courageous young Nigerians powered all. Time and again, when parliament failed, the streets became the true legislature. Yet, we, the baby boomer generation, who were severely baptised in street battles, struggle to understand this new cohort: the Gen Zs or the “Homo Digitalis”. This “Naija” generation is born into a digital world, carrying the legacy of three generations, and operating at speeds that leave traditional institutions lagging. Their strengths are transformative: digital nativism that pushes for transparency and global awareness, network effects that turn a tweet into a movement more powerful than any media campaign, and a data-driven mindset that demands evidence over rhetoric. As Nigeria evolves, the “Modern Federal Republic” must account for citizens increasingly disconnected from their ancestral origins and more united by shared economic and digital interests. The tension between a nineteenth-century bureaucratic structure and a twenty-first-century digital population is now one of the defining challenges of our nation-building efforts. While the government clings to Federal Character in physical appointments, a new generation is creating a borderless nation online, with the tech and fintech ecosystem emerging as Nigeria’s most successful export.
The Prognosis: Three Futures
Even though a Kanuri proverb reminds us that “No matter how long the neck of a bird is, it cannot see into the future,” we dare to say that Nigeria stands at a crossroads, facing three possible futures. First, the crisis of political will remains entrenched—change will only come through social upheaval. Stolper questioned the political will to implement the First Plan in 1962, and six decades later, the diagnosis has remained largely unchanged. A lack of political will by the ruling class to address pressing issues like insecurity, chronic energy deficiency, and youth unemployment exacerbates the problem. My take is that only a major social movement can force progress. #EndSARS for me was a dress rehearsal for the next wave.
Second, the battle between productive and destructive entrepreneurs will shape our destiny. William Baumol taught that all societies have entrepreneurs, but the incentive structure determines whether they build or destroy. In Nigeria, destructive incentives prevail. Corruption in Nigeria is not just a vice—it’s a system, and systems don’t yield to moral persuasion. Third, Nigeria will inevitably be restructured, either through deliberate design or by fragmentation. The likely outcome is a blend of fiscal autonomy, geopolitical zone structures, and boundary adjustments. However, if the central government fails to initiate genuine dialogue, even the power it wields will eventually lose legitimacy.
Conclusion: A Patina of Nation Building or the Real Thing?
Ladies and gentlemen, the essence of my address is the notion that Nigeria’s nation-building is little more than a patina, a thin decorative layer over a structure that was never properly built. Most Nigerians are dissatisfied with government at all levels, surviving not out of hope but necessity. Our greatest threat is the absence of a true social contract. The frameworks exist, but what is missing is the political courage to act. Our capitalist ruling class have to understand that the raid is over because the forest has been seriously depleted. The only sustainable path forward is to build the estate. If they persist as raiders, what legacy are we leaving for our children? But as landowners of a thriving Nigerian estate, we protect our wealth and, for the first time, build a true home. To young Nigerians: you are the systems programmers for Nigeria 4.0. You are the Ctrl+Alt+Delete generation. Will you force the restart this Nation desperately needs?
And to our celebrant, Dr Chido Onumah: Happy 60th birthday, comrade. Your life’s work, spanning student activism, whistleblowing, and anti-corruption, serves as the blueprint for reclaiming Nigeria: an unwavering insistence that institutions must protect, not prey upon, citizens. The struggle continues, and your generation’s task is not yet finished. As a Yoruba proverb says, “When you want to roast a python, you do not build a fire as long as the snake.” I leave you with a riddle: Three roommates shared a flat. One was deaf and mute, one was blind, and one was lame. One morning, the deaf and mute man discovered the lame roommate had died. How did he communicate this to his blind roommate? Solving it requires what Nigeria needs most: imagination beyond convention, empathy across differences, and the refusal to accept that a problem is insoluble simply because it appears impossible.
Thank You for your attention.
Yakubu Aboki Ochefu, Professor of Economic History and Development Studies, Fr. Moses Orshio Adasu University, Makurdi, delivered this lecture on Friday, April 10, 2026, at the Yar’Adua Centre, Abuja, in Honour of Dr. Chido Onumah at 60.
