World Bank officials have stated that it would take 15 years of subsidy removal for the effects to be felt, and that it could take up to 100 years for countries like Nigeria to eradicate extreme poverty. This confirms what some of us have been saying: that economic reforms and gradualism cannot resolve the country’s problems or bring prosperity.
A home is the number one source of wealth in the world — the summum bonum, the ultimate good. Unfortunately, Nigeria has the highest homelessness rate in the world, with 28 million homeless people. Only about 300,000 homes are built annually, while the population grows by around 5 million people each year. Even if the county were to increase the construction of homes by 1000%, which none of the current economic theories or plans can achieve, more people will still fall into poverty every year.
The “Fathers of Classical Economics” – Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus – espoused economic theories that supported the supply-side capitalist economic system of wealthy and powerful nations. However, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Great Depression of 1929, with millions of poor people threatening the survival of capitalism, forced world governments to recognize that housing was the ultimate good. This led to the adoption of demand-side economics, aimed at building massive suburban housing for the masses.
Maynard Keynes, the father of modern economics and macroeconomics, argued that governments should use deficit budgeting to empower the people through housing and employment. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 New Deal was one of the greatest wealth transfers in history, engaging in massive public works and transitioning workers from low-wage agricultural jobs into higher-paying technical manufacturing roles. Similarly, Chairman Mao’s policies in China elevated a billion poor people into prosperity, the largest non-war-based economic empowerment in history.
This new economic ideology of social welfarism and the “Big Push” development model, which focused on providing housing for the masses, spread throughout the Northern hemisphere in the 1950s. In Africa, leaders like Obafemi Awolowo replicated this model. However, in the late 1970s, these social welfare policies were replaced with neo-liberal economic policies imposed by the IMF, which have entrenched poverty in many African nations, including Nigeria.
Only a “Big Push” development approach, not mainstream economic theories, can lift a people who have been ruthlessly exploited for over 500 years — first through slavery, then colonization, and now neocolonization. The Black race cannot achieve global economic parity without addressing the historical economic and sociopolitical costs of these systems. Economic gradualism, with its low growth rates, is too little and too late to address the rapid population growth and global economic fluctuations.
With the level of poverty in Nigeria, neither demand-side economics nor supply-side economics can systematically uplift a people who have been condemned to low-income primary production since the days of slavery. Yet, global and local economic scholars continue to preach the same plantation-style economics based on cheap labor, which has kept many in poverty due to low wages. Despite Nigeria’s agriculture sector being the fifth largest in the world in terms of value-added, the laws of diminishing returns require a reduction in human labor, replaced by machinery — something that can only be achieved through the multiplier effects of heavy manufacturing, not through imports or assembly.
African leaders, mentally enslaved by Eurocentric education and trapped by the realities of colonization, have been unable to create meaningful economic value. Their economies are built on the production of primary products, while importing processed goods. If countries like Nigeria print money or borrow excessively, the result is inflation, as the money is used to buy foreign imports. The IMF and World Bank financial systems have kept developing nations trapped in a cycle of currency devaluation, reducing wages and withdrawing social contracts that could empower the masses.
The fallacy of devaluation is that it supposedly makes exports cheaper and imports more expensive. However, in countries like Nigeria, which still rely on a single primary product (oil), imports remain inelastic — essential goods that cannot be replaced by local production. Thus, no matter how much the currency is devalued, oil exports won’t increase, and imports won’t decrease significantly. This is economic slavery, as the people are prohibited from creating value outside the colonial economic system, further entrenching poverty.
The coloniality of knowledge and power has sustained the neocolonial system. Even leaders have internalized the slavemasters’ pitch that if a slave works hard enough, producing primary products and buying provisions, he will eventually buy his freedom. Sixty years after independence, Nigeria’s economy remains a colonial one, with local production focused on agriculture and crude oil exports. Despite being one of the largest oil producers, Nigeria cannot process its crude locally, much like it couldn’t process cocoa during colonial times.
In the short window between the 1960s and 1970s, Nigeria and other neocolonial nations began to build manufacturing industries, processing food, beverages, and tobacco, and even assembling cars. However, 80% of raw materials were still imported. International monetary forces and colonial political machinations sabotaged the development of a steel and petrochemical complex that could have made the economy locally sustainable. A heavy manufacturing sector, which would include an arms industry, was seen as a threat to European domination in Africa.
As I outlined in my book The Nigerian Dream, a responsible nationalist government should within 100 days reopen all refineries to end fuel imports, cutting 30% off the import bill, and mandate that all government tiers use locally produced cars, cutting 21% off the import bill. According to Modern Monetary Theory, a government can print as much money as it needs, as long as it is focused on creating real value and not buying imports that fuel inflation. Nigeria should aim to build 5 million homes annually for three years, using 100% locally sourced materials, which would reduce homelessness and redistribute wealth to the masses, boosting the consumer market.
At the same time, Nigeria should construct three major railways — 5,000 kilometers of track — within the next three years. Railways are a massive source of iron and chemicals, which will stimulate growth in heavy manufacturing and transform car assembly plants into full car production facilities with locally sourced materials. These massive housing and railway projects would pull workers from the low-wage agricultural sector, increasing wages across the economy and spurring the development of locally produced agricultural machinery.
It is advisable that the military oversee these projects to reduce costs and protect the national economic interests, much like the U.S. industrial-military complex or China’s Liberation Army. This is the springboard that will lead Nigeria into economic prosperity, shedding the chains of 500 years of economic slavery.
** Justice J. Faloye is the author of The Blackworld Evolution to Revolution, President of the ASHE Foundation think tank, and National Publicity Secretary of Afenifere.
