As Africa becomes more peaceful - in the sense of no more wars like in Sierra Leone, Libera, Angola - and democratic, elections will increasingly be fought on economics.
People like Buhari - who know zero about economics - are the last of a dying breed. In the near future it won’t be possible to campaign without telling people how you’ll make them rich(er) with policies that make (some) sense
Which brings me to my point - I’ve said it before that American economic history is the *perfect* template for African countries. Not China, not Europe. It’s America that holds all the lessons of what to do (and what not to do)
Unfortunately, all of this happened in America ages ago. So even the average American today can’t tell you how they got rich (tbh, they don’t really need to know). But an economy like Nigeria is somewhere 1850 - 1900 America so those lessons are important
For e.g whisper it quietly but America (and Britain) industrialised *without* electricity. It’s fashionable today to say lack of electricity is the cause of xx in Nigeria/Africa. But if you really want to industrialise, what you need is energy. A small but important distinction
Anyhew, I want to recommend my 2 favourite books of this year. Either one is fine but I recommend reading both. The one on the left has no graphs and few numbers. But both are very readable and very very enjoyable 
You’ll spot a lot of the foolishness going on in Nigeria very easily. And maybe if enough people know, especially the sequence of development, maybe foolish leaders can be penalised. We live in hope
Remember - you’re reading to know what to do and what *not* to do. As an example, America’s Smoot-Hawley Tariffs of 1930. We know tariffs are pointless, but something that finally clicked to me is how tariffs cause people to behave
When tariffs are high, people start to misallocate investments very confidently into the tariffed industry thinking that ‘money has come’. Which means you’ll get a lot of bad debts in the banking sector if and when the tariffs finally die (or smugglers short circuit them)
You can see that playing out in Nigeria over and over and over again even as we speak. The slight difference now is that something like Anchor Borrowers is CBN funded so Meffy just prints the money.
Anyway, read both books. They are going to be joint winners of the prestigious and highly sought after annual Aguntasolo Book of the Year Award (barring that I read something amazing in December)
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P.S the reason why I said the Chinese model (whatever it is) cannot work in Africa is this - There are over 1 billion people in China broken down into 55 ethnic groups. One ethnic group - Han - makes up more than 95% of the total. I wish policy could be written in a vacuum, alas
America was a lot closer to Africa than you think - once you stop viewing people as simply white or black. There were all kinds of people with all kind of issues, languages in the melting pot (FDR, Dutch, Eisenhower, German, JFK, Irish). Somehow they made prosperity out of it
