As usual @gidimeister with a quality thread.
I think it's a combination of incentives that compel the ruling elite to push growth, and a culture that inclines them to do so.
I think it's a combination of incentives that compel the ruling elite to push growth, and a culture that inclines them to do so.
I think we agree that the makers of Nigeria set her up to be an extractive colonial economy. Their Nigerian successors were fine with that set-up because they had no cultural/ideological values saying otherwise. And what about incentives?...
Crude oil took away the incentives for the leaders to build a prosperous society. The lack of a need of taxes from the primary and secondary sectors to feed government means government and the political class that controls it can let the economy rot.
I think it was you, @gidimeister, who showed us a chart with the African nations without mineral resources having positive growth, while those with oil etc were going backwards?
Back to the Chinese. Communism was wrongheaded about its means and some of its ends, but it believed in prosperity for its people as a metric to prove superiority over capitalism. People like Deng rose to the top by being true believers in that ideology.
What Deng got right, and other communist leaders got wrong, was to hold on to that communist end goal of general prosperity, and fix every other thing in the ideology that got in the way of it coming to fruition (ie communism itself).
The cadre of African leaders from the 1970s to date have no similar strongly held ideology to order their thinking and direct their passion. So of course, given absolute power, they will use it to get more power and money. The Chinese elite have ideology.
The Arab monarchs have a more problematic but still useful ideology: God gave us this oil, and absolute power. We will use both to make our people comfortable, as long as they shut the fuck up and let us rule them in peace.
I said this, and I think this needs some further thinking out loud. Please bear with me.
I don't think most of our Independence era leaders, from their words which I have read, had a clear conception of what Nigeria should be, beyond "free of Britain". Their sense of this nation was purely rooted in "us vs them". When the white Them left, we found black Them.
