₦airaland Forum

Kemi Badenoch is criticising Nigeria's leaders for failing to deliver electricity despite the country being one of the world's top oil producers, blaming it on "stupid public policy".

Kemi has roasted Nigeria's leaders once again🥲

Nigeria is one of the world's highest oil-producing countries but lacks electricity. Stupid ideas bankrupt a country — Kemi Badenoch pic.twitter.com/09WIK7FuVq

— Felix (@felixherbt) June 13, 2026

How Igbophobia Drove Ni***ria Into Being A Predatory State
A predatory state is a country that exists primarily to exploit its people and natural resources for the enrichment of a corrupt elite rather than for national development. When a nation’s leadership focuses solely on extracting natural resources, overtaxing citizens, and suppressing dissent to serve elite interests—while allowing the economy, security, and infrastructure to deteriorate—the state becomes predatory. Nizooria exemplifies this condition.

Across the world, responsible states manage natural resources such as coal, solid minerals, crude oil, and natural gas with long-term development in mind. No country has achieved sustained prosperity by merely consuming the proceeds from the sale of natural resources. Those that attempted this path often became worse off despite their abundance of wealth. In contrast, developmental states reinvest resource revenues into entrepreneurship, industrialisation, agriculture, and productive sectors of the economy.

When a country abandons a culture of hard work and merit in favour of dependence on natural resource rents, it ultimately becomes poorer. Resource wealth may appear attractive, but it fosters dependency, weakens productivity, and entrenches corruption. In such systems, access to power becomes the ultimate prize, stifling innovation, eroding creative problem-solving, and undermining the ingenuity of the people—qualities that are essential for survival, growth, and sustainable development.

Europe, for example, possesses fewer natural resources than many other continents, yet it remains the most developed. The Middle East, despite its vast resource endowment, has struggled to translate that wealth into broad-based development. Europe’s transformation was driven by the Industrial Revolution, which laid the foundation for productivity, innovation, and global influence. By contrast, heavy dependence on crude oil has not propelled much of the Middle East toward diversified and sustainable development. Instead, it has often coincided with persistent conflict, political instability, and social fragmentation.

Even in cases where oil wealth was deliberately distributed to the population—such as in Libya and Iraq—the outcomes were disastrous, culminating in state collapse and prolonged instability. This failure stems largely from an approach to development that treats resource wealth as a benevolent handout rather than as capital to drive productive, people-led economic transformation. Learning from these experiences, several Arab states, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai, have increasingly redirected oil revenues into tourism, infrastructure, and industrialisation as pathways to long-term sustainability.

Nizooria, by contrast, began its postcolonial journey on a relatively strong economic footing, with agriculture as the backbone of its economy. This sector actively engaged the population in production, income generation, and value creation. Historical records indicate that by many measures, Nizooria was economically better off sixty years ago than it is today. Beyond agriculture, the former Eastern Region also possessed coal reserves and significant deposits of crude oil and natural gas. The coal deposits in Enugu, for instance, led to the development of Port Harcourt as a major export port.

Notably, the Eastern Regional Government deliberately limited the dominance of coal in the economy, choosing instead to reinvest its proceeds into agriculture and industrialisation. This strategy resulted in the establishment of agricultural settlements and industrial layouts across the region. As a consequence, resource ownership did not become a basis for entitlement or rent-seeking. Communities did not abandon productivity to demand royalties or obstruct production. This disciplined, development-oriented approach helped make the Eastern Region one of the fastest-growing economies of its time.

Despite the efforts of the Eastern Regional Government to instil discipline and rationality in its economic system, political actors in Northern and Western Nizooria increasingly coveted the region’s crude oil resources and awaited an opportunity to centralise control over them. To advance this objective, various forms of propaganda were promoted among minority communities, portraying crude oil as a source of effortless prosperity that would eliminate the need for productive labour. The culture of discipline, enterprise, and self-reliance that the Eastern Regional Government had consciously nurtured was gradually undermined and replaced—at the national level—by policies that encouraged dependency and rent-seeking. This shift was largely driven by the determination to remove control of crude oil from the Igbo-dominated Eastern Region.

In this context, figures such as Isaac Adaka Boro—who had himself benefited from Eastern Regional scholarships funded by coal revenues—began advancing resource-ownership narratives, later echoed by Ken Saro-Wiwa. When the opportunity presented itself during the civil war, the emerging predatory Nizoorian state aligned with these sentiments. As a result, leadership standards deteriorated and the national value system shifted decisively. Productivity and enterprise were displaced by entitlement and consumption.

Rivers State was subsequently designated the “treasure base” of the nation, a symbolic and practical indicator of the country’s transition from a production-oriented economy to one centred on resource consumption. Nizooria evolved into a fully predatory state, focused almost exclusively on resource extraction. In pursuit of this objective, the state resorted to extreme measures—including the invasion of communities, administrative gerrymandering of states and localities, and the coercive consolidation of control—to facilitate crude oil exploitation, rather than using resource wealth as a tool to mobilise citizens toward development.

As crude oil was elevated to near-mythical status, agriculture and industrialisation steadily declined. Federal policies and entrenched corruption actively discouraged farming and manufacturing, even as oil revenues were glorified as a substitute for productive effort. The East Central State, which ought to have emerged as an entrepreneurial and industrial hub after the war, was instead deliberately weakened. Social sectors such as education, healthcare, power, and transportation were subjected to unsustainable subsidies, all financed from the same finite resource base. In effect, the foundations of long-term development were sacrificed for short-term consumption, entrenching Nizooria’s transformation into a predatory state.

Over the decades, subsidies and corruption persisted, while population growth and elite rent-seeking expanded dramatically. The critical difference, however, was that the primary source of public finance—crude oil—did not grow in proportion. This imbalance laid the groundwork for systemic failure. Had crude oil revenues been invested in industrialisation, entrepreneurship, and agriculture—as the Eastern Region once did—population growth would likely have translated into large-scale economic expansion rather than deepening poverty.

Instead, the state pursued consumption over production, patronage over productivity, and short-term political appeasement over long-term development. The result is a country that has steadily hollowed itself out. After more than six decades of crude oil exploitation, citizens struggle to afford fuel, lack reliable electricity, face mass unemployment, and are unable to secure basic necessities or personal safety. Even core state functions—such as territorial defence and internal security—have weakened significantly despite over sixty-five years of independence.

What is unfolding today is the cumulative consequence of prioritising easy oil money over investing in people as creators of value and masters of their own economic destiny. The country is now markedly worse off than it was sixty years ago by many meaningful indicators. This decline is not accidental; it is the product of sustained greed, institutional decay, and deliberate policy choices that dismantled productive capacity in favour of extractive control.

History will likely judge this failure not by the absence of resources, but by the squandered opportunity to convert abundance into development.

kpankpangolo:
It’s not a unique situation. Ask Venezuela.

unitysheart:
Is it something to be happy about or proud of?

Kemi has roasted Nigeria's leaders once again🥲

Nigeria is one of the world's highest oil-producing countries but lacks electricity. Stupid ideas bankrupt a country — Kemi Badenoch pic.twitter.com/09WIK7FuVq

— Felix (@felixherbt) June 13, 2026

unitysheart:
Is it something to be happy about or proud of?