Thread by @DoubleEph

Short rant on politics and the economy

After Biden took the lead in GA, all of my Nigerian timeline was taken over by stories of the role Stacy Abrams played in making that happen particularly with her Fair Fight PAC

But I did not see a single comment on the economic context in which she made that happen. Here it is - the GDP of the state of GA - at $540bn - is almost 40% bigger than Nigeria’s. To add insult to injury, there are less than 11 million people there

Why are young Nigerians so disinterested in the actual workings of economic development as the tool that makes so much else happen? This continues to baffle me. By the way Abrams raised ~$33m for the effort

I don’t doubt that young people in Nigeria can organise to take power in 2023 or soon after. But there is a troubling sense in which today’s young people are behaving *exactly* like the post-independence generation who were not bothered with building an economy to pay for things

Then, as in now, the economy was an afterthought. Like something you didn’t need to do much about as long as there was a commodity paying the bills. Of course it inevitably ran out of fuel allowing countries that were poorer than Nigeria in the 70s to leave it in the dust today

60% of Nigerians are ‘employed’ in ‘agriculture’. There is a huge void in the economy with nothing but a big hole in it. That is the hole that needs to be filled for everything else to work

As I’ve said before, because the grunge work of building most western economies was done a long long time ago, the average westerner today cannot tell you how it was done. It is your job not to be taken in by that.

Rant Over