Oil Price Crash:How Nigeria Past leaders goofed

Photo by Guardian

The rising poverty rate among the masses in Nigerian should be blamed on the country's past leaders who failed to judiciously manage huge proceeds from oil revenue.

The Country Officer of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) Dr. Dauda Garuba said, in-spite of enormous revenue derived from the sale of crude oil, the price of which exceeded $100 per barrel at some points, poverty has risen among the people , with a lot more living bellow one dollar per day.

"Between 1980 and 2006, we saw that those who were living under one dollar per day, grew from 20 to almost 70 percent". 

"Figure by National Bureau of Statistics in  2010 shows that relative poverty in Nigeria  grew from 54 to 9.1 percent". 

Garuba said the best practice was to invest revenue from oil as no generation has the right to eat up proceeds from non renewable natural resources.

According to him, the investment involves the use of oil money to develop other sectors of the economy, which would have yielded more revenue to fall back to when oil must have finished.

However, he said in the case of Nigeria, everything including the future was eaten, thus eluding the country genuine growth.

 "Having produced oil for 58 years, your per capital income increased from 33 dollars in 1965 to 345 dollars in 2000, but income per capital has stagnated on 1100 since independence in 1960". 

"If you have a natural resource economy that is not tied to other sectors of the economy, the tendency is for it to deceive you by raising the GDP but in real sense , because it is outside the economy, you don’t even know", he concluded.