In November 2010, a lifelong dream of mine came true when I got to attend a Liverpool FC game at the iconic Anfield stadium in Liverpool. Sitting next to me in the Kenny Dalglish stand was a Norwegian fellow called Thurston (name has been changed). We struck up a conversation and I discovered that he was just one of thousands of Norwegian Liverpool fans who made the 2,000km plus+ pilgrimage to Anfield at least a dozen times every season. Wasn’t that expensive, I wanted to know? Not really, he said. From Oslo to Amsterdam by train cost about €52, followed by a €32 flight to Manchester Airport, then a €24 train ride from the airport direct to Liverpool Lime Street station, which is within walking distance of Anfield.
Essentially, including a one night stay at a budget hotel, he could make a 4,000km round trip across Europe for just about €240 – roughly 5.8 percent of Norway’s €4,137 median monthly income. A few months later, I met a Dutch Arsenal fan in London who casually mentioned that he had an Arsenal season ticket despite living in Amsterdam. For the princely sum of €77 – less than the €80 average price of an upper tier matchday ticket at the Emirates – he could get on the Eurostar to London every matchday to watch his favourite team play in another country, and get back home to the Bijlmermeer in time for dinner.
The current Nigerian legislative exclusive list is effectively a tool for enforcing poverty on those who do not want to be poor
The economic impact of having such a highly developed and well connected transport system within a trading area did not fully sink in until 2016 when I found myself on an official assignment in Asaba and I needed to get back to Lagos that night. In typical Nigerian airline fashion, all 40 plus of us waiting for the 2pm flight were informed that our flight had been cancelled, and no further flights to Lagos were available that day. The few available God Is Good coaches were snapped up before I got to the bus park, so I found myself boarding a bus to Lagos which the driver started by putting two wires together under the steering wheel.
Between then and now, the situation has not changed in any way other than the fact that flight tickets to and from Asaba now cost almost double what they did in 2016. In the 21st century, along one of the busiest and most critical trade routes on the continent, the only options for moving people and goods are expensive and unreliable air travel or dangerous road travel along unsafe highways inside vehicles of dubious roadworthiness. Why is this the case?
Government corruption? Wicked leadership? Incompetence? These answers are uniformly wrong. The real reason for Nigeria’s devastating lack of economy-boosting transport infrastructure is a little thing called the “Exclusive List.”
Nigeria’s ‘Exclusive List’: A case study in how to create poverty and conflict
To cut a long story short, the exclusive legislative list is a list of activities in Nigeria that the 1999 constitution declared to be the sole preserve of the federal government. Most countries also have some form of government exclusive list that forecloses non-state participation in areas like law enforcement, border protection and defense, courts and judiciary, money minting, taxation, immigration, trade representation and so on. The purpose of an exclusive list is to make sure that certain key sectors in a society are held in public trust, as against in private hands, which is a reasonable intention. Certainly nobody would want to live in a country where every billionaire has access to their own private currency, laws and military. An exclusive list essentially gives a government its entire raison d’être, which boils down to protecting the collective interests of its citizens.
Nigeria’s exclusive list, however, goes way beyond any of this. In addition to preserving sole government participation in these areas, it makes it illegal for anyone but the federal government (FG) to build, own or operate interstate rail infrastructure in Nigeria, as well as mine minerals or natural resources. Individuals and organisations up to and including state governments are forbidden from generating, distributing or transmitting electricity using a grid outside of the existing national grid. The list has 68 items on it, many of which present dozens of legal and operational problems when it comes to enforcement.
For example the list states that the construction and maintenance of federal trunk roads can only be performed by the FG. This particular provision has been the source of much controversy over the past decade and a half as several state governments complain that economically important roads passing through their jurisdictions have been left to fall into disrepair, and there is too much ambiguity about whether they are allowed to intervene or of they will be reimbursed after doing so. The taxation proviso has also created an everlasting war of attrition between the federal and state taxation bodies, who both insist that they are the preeminent authority for tax collection.
The most damaging and obvious effect of the exclusive list is that it clearly, repeatedly and continuously acts as a drag on the economy of the parts of Nigeria that have both a business case for certain infrastructure and the wherewithal to build them. I have repeatedly made the point recently that Nigeria’s primary economic corridors are Lagos, Ogun and Oyo states in the southwest, and Rivers, Abia, Anambra and Enugu in the southeast. A double track standard gauge rail line or a direct high speed expressway linking both corridors is an economic no-brainer. What is more, the constituent states could quite easily fund such construction themselves even if the FG for whatever reason sees no value in it. The exclusive list, however, makes such an activity illegal.
In other words, the current Nigerian legislative exclusive list is effectively a tool for enforcing poverty on those who do not want to be poor, thus creating avoidable tensions and resentment that inevitably exacerbate the country’s existing ethno-tribal divisions.
Make no mistake, Nigeria has two economies
In this column I often point out that the “Nigeria’s market is 210 million people” economic hope soup is statistically flawed and evidently untrue when any sort of market analysis is carried out.
What I perhaps do not mention enough is that if you draw an East-West diagonal line across a map of Nigeria splitting Benue, Kogi and Kwara from Niger, Nasarawa and Taraba, you would have almost perfectly demarcated the sub-economies of Nigeria into “middle-low income” and “miserably poor.”
If the southern half of Nigeria were a country, it would be a middle income country with a per capita GDP approaching $3,000, as against the bottom of the world poverty rankings as Nigeria collectively is. A 2018 NBS report on the subnational GDP breakdown of 22 states in Nigeria shows that of the top 10 most productive states in Nigeria, only three are not from the southern half. The report by the way, did not include Lagos, which would sit well clear at the top of the list with its $136bn GDP. If we include Lagos on the list, that leaves just the FCT and Kano as the non-southern entries – and as we all know, the FCT’s economy is inflated by virtue of being the seat of government. Of the next 10 states ranked in the report, 6 are also from the south, which tells a stark and undeniable story about where the economy of Nigeria is.
It is in Nigeria’s economic interest for the most economically active states to aggregate their activities and compound the results by linking themselves via road and rail. It is also in Nigeria’s interest for them to be able to control their own port infrastructure so as to avoid the delays and losses that come with federal red tape and inefficiency. If the decision-makers, however, share the sentiments and thought process of Salihu Tanko Yakasai who during the last elections expressed dismay at the ruling party’s shrinking vote share in the southwest “despite getting a whole train line,” that could explain why they are happy for the absurd, anti-economy status quo to continue.
In the minds of such people, infrastructure investment is not a logical function of economics, but a sentimental, political decision. To the Tanko Yakasais of Nigeria, a train line is a shiny trinket to point at and feel “pride,” as against a cold, unimpressive but extremely important economic tool. His political persuasion would rather build a criminally unviable standard gauge rail line from Kano to Niger Republic and watch it fall into disuse and disrepair, than invest in the blindingly obvious Lagos – Port Harcourt route that would not only return profits to the investor, but could on its own add a good 5 to 10 percent annual growth to the Nigerian economy.
To such people who are in and around power in Abuja, my message is simple – innovate or die.
The old system of patronage built on everlasting resource extraction rents is almost dead on its feet. Africa’s natural resources are going the way of the Dodo within a few years. Without rapid investment in infrastructure to ease and accelerate trade, we will all fall into extreme poverty within two decades. If the southern half of Nigeria will develop first and “leave the north behind,” that is not a bad thing. That will mean increased tax receipts for the north to modernise and eventually industrialise itself. If you cannot see the bigger picture and you insist on making everybody uniformly poor because your fear of your neighbour is greater than your love for yourself, that really would be tragic.
In the evergreen words of musician-turned-billionaire entrepreneur Sean ‘Jay-Z’ Carter, “If we’re both poor, I can’t help you.”
