NATURAL RESOURCE GOVERNANCE AND NIGERIA’S DEVELOPMENT QUAGMIRE

A REPROBATE PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The orthodoxy around Nigeria’s development challenges vis-à-vis her enormous natural resource endowment is that the former is a function of the abandonment of agriculture and the privileging of oil as the sole driver of the nation’s development. Such explanations readily point to the disappearance of the famous groundnut pyramids in the North, the withering of the previously massive cocoa production activities in the West, and the drying up of palm oil flows in the East as evidence of such abandonment. They further point to the contribution of oil to the nation’s foreign exchange earnings and her overall revenue stream as evidence of the excessive reliance on oil and the monocultural nature of Nigeria’s economy. Consequently, such explanations recommend an immediate reversal to agriculture as a panacea for overcoming Nigeria’s lingering development quagmire. This paper makes a departure from such humdrum explanations. It takes the counterintuitive view that the nation did not abandon agriculture nor could she be said to have relied on oil for her development. Instead, the paper argues that following the unfortunate events of 1966 to 1970, the development enterprise in Nigeria was frozen and national energy, including her natural resource wealth, was perversely diverted to the oiling of the nation’s power calculus by the ruling elite. Without prejudice to the merits of diversification, the study recommends a re-jigging of national development through the full activation and deployment of all of the nation’s resources; agricultural, oil, and especially her immense human resources.