The comparison is often made between two countries that on the surface share a lot in common – both oil economies that began to emerge in the second half of the 20th century, with significant Muslim populations, large swathes of difficult terrain and huge infrastructural and educational challenges at the onset of their emergence.
Yet, while the UAE has grown in leaps and bounds to become on the world’s foremost destinations and the location of Dubai, which is a bona fide global destination city, Nigeria has stubbornly remained well, Nigeria.
This has variously been attributed to corruption, cultural differences, ethnic diversity, population, basic civilisational differences and an ever-expanding list of plausible reasons. Having traveled to this country a few times, my assessment is that all these reasons are not correct – at least not individually. The real issue is not that they are necessarily wrong, but that they are all right at the same time. In other words, when you combine a mixture of differences in this manner and put everything in a petri dish, waiting for the outcome, this is what you get.
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One of the most enduring and misguided assumptions underpinning the constant comparison between both countries is the assumption that their economies are both backed by hydrocarbon resource extraction. While this may be true in the case of the UAE, which has financed its famously eye-watering infrastructural expenditure in Abu Dhabi and Dubai through its oil revenues, this is absolutely not the case in Nigeria.
For one thing, while the UAE has a total population of 9.4 million (the vast majority of whom are foreign workers and tourists), Nigeria has a population touching 200 million, the vast majority of whom are Nigerian citizens.
What this means is that while both countries produce roughly the same amount of oil per day (Nigeria produces 2.3 million bpd while the UAE produces 2.9 million bpd), the amount of work that the amounts fetched are expected to finance is a lot less in the UAE.
In Nigeria, the annual government budget of barely $20 billion is expected to sustain a bloated federal and state civil service structure, the most expensive bicameral legislature in the world, a famously extensive system of patronage and contract inflation and finally, at the bottom of the list, capital expenditure to fund infrastructure investment.
The Emiratis effectively get 18 times the value for each dollar that Nigeria gets if we use an assumed population of 180 million to compare to their roughly 10 million people. So while the Emirates can be accurately described as an oil-rich economy, Nigeria cannot. Nigeria is a poverty ridden trade-and-agriculture economy that happens to have oil revenues financing a completely disconnected government which functions independent of the country it allegedly administers.
So the lesson here is twofold. First of all, the next time we go to Dubai or Abu Dhabi, we need to stop making that reflexive comparison with what we have back home. They are not our proverbial mates, for lack of a better expression. The second lesson is that we only have a government in the most general sense of the word.
Maybe we need to do something about that.
Not today? OK then.
