Nigeria’s predicament is not destiny. It is the cumulative result of choices made and sustained. The question history will ask is not how much land Nigeria had or how many peoples it contained, but whether its leaders built a state capable of turning those realities into shared prosperity.
THE divergent trajectories of Singapore, Nigeria, Ghana, and Rwanda illustrate a fundamental truth of development: geography, land size, population, ethnicity, and religion do not determine outcomes on their own. They are neutral conditions. What determines success or failure is how the state governs them. Policy gives these factors meaning. Where governance is coherent and fair, constraints are managed and even turned into advantages. Where governance is weak, the same factors become accelerants of decline.
Land size and arable land are often treated as decisive assets, especially in African political discourse. Yet Singapore, with almost no arable land, built prosperity through human capital, trade, logistics, and disciplined institutions. Rwanda, despite extreme land scarcity and density, raised agricultural productivity through land use coordination, terracing, irrigation, and state oversight. Nigeria presents the paradox. It possesses vast land and enormous agricultural potential, yet remains food insecure and import dependent. The explanation lies not in soil quality or acreage, but in policy failure. Weak land administration, insecure tenure, poor rural infrastructure, lack of extension services, and distorted incentives have left agriculture fragmented and unproductive. Land abundance without governance has produced waste rather than wealth.
Ethnic and religious diversity follows the same pattern. Diversity itself is not a curse. Singapore and Ghana are plural societies that avoided large scale fragmentation by building civic, rule based states where citizenship mattered more than identity. Rwanda, after catastrophic ethnic collapse, deliberately subordinated group identity to national identity in public administration. Nigeria chose a different path. Instead of depoliticizing identity through fairness and merit, the state institutionalized ethnic and religious balancing through patronage, informal quotas, and selective enforcement of law. Intended as inclusion, this approach entrenched mediocrity, weakened institutions, and turned identity into a permanent political weapon. When access to opportunity depends on who you are rather than what you can do, national cohesion erodes and development stalls.
Federalism could have been Nigeria’s structural advantage in managing land, population, and diversity. In practice, excessive centralization hollowed it out. States lack real fiscal autonomy yet are blamed for failure. Local governments exist largely on paper. The federal center became a prize for zero sum capture rather than a coordinator of development. This distorted incentive system intensified ethnic and religious competition, because control of the center determines access to resources in a rent dominated economy.
These structural weaknesses have been aggravated by the failures of the current government. There is no credible long term strategy linking population growth to education, jobs, housing, and health. Policy announcements are frequent, but execution is thin. Food insecurity persists despite repeated agricultural initiatives. Urban planning remains reactive, allowing cities to sprawl chaotically without transport, drainage, or affordable housing. Public education continues to deteriorate, with millions of children out of school, while health care remains inaccessible to large segments of the population. Security failures now shape demographics through displacement and fear, undermining both productivity and social trust.
Most damaging is the continued tolerance of impunity. Corruption is not treated as an existential threat to development but as background noise. Laws are enforced selectively. Public office is still widely perceived as a route to extraction rather than service. This destroys the credibility of the state and neutralizes every reform effort. Citizens who do not trust the state will not align their behavior, fertility choices, or economic decisions with national goals.
The reforms Nigeria needs are therefore not obscure. Human capital must be treated as a national emergency, with massive investment in basic education and primary health care. Land must be governed as an economic resource, through secure tenure, functional land registries, rural infrastructure, and integrated agricultural value chains. Federalism must be made real, restoring fiscal responsibility and accountability to subnational governments. Ethnicity and religion must be depoliticized through merit based public service, equal application of the law, and strict constitutional neutrality. Above all, institutional discipline must be restored. Without ending impunity, no policy will endure.
The lesson from Singapore, Ghana, and Rwanda is not that Nigeria should copy their models wholesale, but that states succeed when they are coherent, fair, and purposeful. Land abundance does not compensate for weak institutions. Diversity does not doom a nation unless the state chooses partiality over justice. Population does not become power unless people are educated, healthy, and productively employed.
Nigeria’s predicament is not destiny. It is the cumulative result of choices made and sustained. The question history will ask is not how much land Nigeria had or how many peoples it contained, but whether its leaders built a state capable of turning those realities into shared prosperity.
- https://atlanticdigest.com/opinion/nigeria-and-the-cost-of-policy-failure-lessons-from-singapore-ghana-and-rwanda/