By Banji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka
It is the
devil’s excrement. We are drowning in the devil’s excrement. —Juan
Pablo Pérez Alfonso, Founder OPEC.
All in all, I wish we had discovered
water. —Sheik Ahmed Yamani, Oil minister, Saudi Arabia
Ordinarily, finding a “treasure” tends to bring joy to the one who found it. Oil discovery has become Nigeria’s developmental Achilles’ Heel: in popular parlance, a Resource Curse. Six decades after independence, Nigeria remains one of the poorest countries in the world. It has evolved into one of the least economically diversified country in the world because of a pathological dependence on oil export earnings. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the dangers of such dependence in ways never experienced in the past. The yoke of Nigeria’s colonial past of being a supplier of raw materials rather than a processor of commodities resulted in a country of a net exporter of crude petroleum and importer of products mired in perennial debate about “fuel subsidy.”
