Social Policy in a Mineral-Rich Economy: The Case of Nigeria

In the widening atmosphere of pessimism about state and society in Africa, even as some measure of economic growth is celebrated as evidence of the dividends of 25 years of economic reform, Nigeria is one country that is generally considered to fit the bill regarding failed development or the perverse way in which Africa works. The euphoria of the late 1980s has given way to ambivalence and pessimism; its civil society is marked as uncivil or perverse, and its political system broken and held up as patrimonialism of a rentier state. The resource curse discourse claims that natural wealth and resource endowment are the reasons why a country like Nigeria is doomed to failure. It is a discourse that is deployed to explain a range of things, from social fragmentation to ethnic politics, corruption and civic violence. It is argued that with a development prospect considered much better than Indonesia’s at independence, Nigeria’s relative poor performance today is a symbol of a much deeper malaise. Much of the argument takes the endogenous conditions as its explanation. In much of the narratives, the resource curse and the logic of a rentier state impose such a structural determinism that policy options for transcending the present become impossible.2 As Wright and Czelusta (2004: 8–9) wondered: ‘What doctor would offer the diagnosis that her patient’s condition is hopeless and had been so from day one, attributing his ills to an ill-fated factor endowment?’