By Kayode Emola
In the 1960s and 70s, when the exploration for crude oil started to truly gain traction and political interest on a global scale, several countries devised models attempting to ensure that the benefits gleaned from this resource would reach the ordinary man on the streets. This commodity, when discovered, has wildly changed the fortunes of many countries: for some, it has been a game-changer in progressing their national development; for others, it has become a curse.
Many poor countries today dream of finding oil, in the same way that poor individuals fantasise about winning the lottery. However, just as many overnight lottery millionaires ultimately end up worse off than they were before the windfall, many countries – including Venezuela and Nigeria, amongst several others – have suffered huge detriment due to their discovery of this commodity.
It is often not recognised that crude oil brings far more trouble than can be comprehended, rather than being some panacea that will solve all of a nation’s problems and elevate their status. One-time Venezuelan oil minister, Juan Pablo Alfonso, once compared crude oil to “The devil’s excrement;” whilst his Saudi Arabian counterpart, Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, is reported as saying that he “wish[ed] we had found water” instead of oil. The case of Nigeria is not dissimilar to the views and experiences of these two men: we were far better off as a country without crude oil than the situation we find ourselves in today.
Whilst many countries have seen great benefits from the oil boom, including Norway and Kuwait amongst others; Nigeria, Nigerians and especially the local communities of the areas where the oil is produced have been dealt problems which surpass imagination. The heavy dependence that Nigeria has evolved upon this natural resource has poisoned the country’s economic and political systems, causing a severe hardship that afflicts over half of the population. We see that the price of everyday necessities, ordinarily dictated by the market forces of supply, demand and competition, instead becomes dependent on the dollar exchange rate and beholden to the fluctuations of the oil price.
The inflow of hard currency from oil royalties to the government reserves disincentivises national investment into non-oil sectors, as these do not provide the same degree of financial returns. This has led to the progressive destruction over several decades of these other sectors, whilst the Nigerian state has failed to make any meaningful investment of the income generated by the crude oil, and instead has frittered it away. Rather than invest in critical infrastructure for the benefit of future generations, successive governments have left us worse off than when we started as an independent nation in 1960, with higher levels of debt, yet nothing to show for the abundance of oil.
Whilst the Nigerian government squandered her precious natural resource, Norway, on the other hand, took a different approach. In the 1970’s, the country opened a savings fund and ensured that every krone made from their oil deposits was deposited into it. This fund is estimated to now be well in excess of a trillion dollars, making every Norwegian worth about $185,000. Conversely, due to the country’s exorbitant wastage, most Nigerians are now living in abject poverty. Yet this is the same nation of which a former head of state once remarked that our problem is not how to make money but how to spend it.
This begs the question, what made the difference between these two countries? How did Norway develop a system that enabled them to provide free education, from basic to tertiary, for every citizen; to sustain a good health care system; to provide every new mother has the opportunity to take up to two years maternity leave? What went wrong with the Nigerian model that we are unable to provide sufficient numbers even of basic school teachers, let alone enough tertiary institutions to cater for its teeming population? Health care in the country is close to shambolic, with Nigerian doctors, health care workers and other experts opting en masse to relocate to better economies.
So what did Norway do right? In 1969, Norway had nearly given up hope of ever finding oil. It was at this that time a young Iraqi geologist, Farouk al-Kashim, emigrated with his Norwegian wife to the country in a bid to find good health care for his last son who had been born with cerebral palsy. Farouk resigned his lofty position in the Iraq Petroleum Company to make the move to Norway in order to save his dying child. A spur-of-the-moment visit to the Ministry of Industry found him unexpectedly in an impromptu job interview. Resultantly, he was hired as a consultant for the Ministry, helping analyse the petrol logs that would highlight the opportunities for a vast oil discovery. His efforts helped to build a model that enabled Norway to avoid the “Dutch disease” – the stifling of non-oil sectors of the economy – which made the difference in infrastructure and social systems still enjoyed by Norwegians today.
Nigeria, in comparison, has already missed the boat. Our economy is now so heavily dependent on oil that the non-oil sector has been left to wither, almost into nothingness. As external loans become increasingly difficult to access, the Nigerian government has resorted to selling state-owned assets in order to shore up its yearly annual deficit. This situation calls for sober reflection by every Nigerian: every passing day results in more and more lives born into abject poverty. Is this a position that is tenable to permit to continue without intervention?
I urge our Yoruba people both at home and abroad to come together in unison at this critical time. We must ensure that the reset button is pressed, safeguarding the gains of self-rule that our parents and their peers enjoyed in the 1950s against being confined to the dustbins of history. When our new nation is born, it will be imperative that we identify our key critical assets within Yoruba land. We must design a model that ensures sustainable and healthy competition among state owned organisations and private enterprise, to the benefit of all. Failure to do so may see us sleep walking into a major disaster in the not-too-distant future. When the population size outstrips the ability of the resources of the Nigerian state to provide for them, what other outcome can there be?
And so, as we stare down the barrel of this impending catastrophe that Nigeria is careering toward, it seems that there can be only one solution. The amalgamation of the assorted tribes into one single entity has brought only tragedy from a resource that should have been a blessing. Therefore, it would appear that the only answer is de-amalgamation, and building our own country from the ground up on a solid foundation of pragmatism and common sense. Let us learn from the failures of the Nigerian model and the successes of the Norwegian, to forge our own path and build a destiny of opportunity for all in Yoruba nation.
