Nigeria’s economic landscape is a riddle wrapped in irony: a nation of over 200 million brilliant minds, yet its loudest giants are not industrialists who build empires, but politicians who build influence. Our public space overflows with political tycoons. I mean men and women whose wealth blooms not from factories, intellectual property, advanced technology, or bold innovation, but from the intimate dance between state power and personal enrichment. The soil of the land seems more fertile for political ambition than entrepreneurial daring.
From the beginning, power in Nigeria was never merely an instrument of governance; it became a marketplace. Influence turned into a currency sharper than any fiscal policy. The fastest return on investment assumed a new definition; be selected not elected into an office, secure a ministry, ascend a board, and with your pen wealth flows like a river in rainy season. Meanwhile, those who attempt enterprise through legitimacy often walk barefoot on gravel.
Yet beneath this surface lies a darker revelation, whispered in offices and shouted in beer parlours: the same political office holders, public servants, and civil servants: custodians of the state are often the same people hiding CAC-registered companies inside office lockers, tucked between dusty files and forgotten memos. They issue contracts to themselves, by themselves, for themselves. Many of these companies have no physical offices, no employees, no operational machinery—only names, stamped documents, and the authority to redirect public wealth into private pockets. It is the nation’s quiet robbery, performed in broad daylight under the seal of legitimacy.
Meanwhile, outside these fortified corridors, the average young business school graduate; brilliant, qualified, burdened with degrees and dreams; keeps borrowing money just to transport themselves to interviews, verification centres, and bidding offices. They borrow money to print proposals, make pitch decks, submit applications, and pray without ceasing. They compete for the same contracts that were already allocated to invisible shelf companies created by the powerful. They chase hope that evaporates before their eyes. Nigeria, in its tragic theatre, often asks its brightest to sprint in a race whose finish line was quietly moved.
This is why the nation struggles to produce business titans of global reckoning. Enterprise requires oxygen; fairness, protection, stable systems, predictable rules, and a market that rewards competence over connection. But Nigeria’s operating system is wired in reverse: the ecosystem rewards access to power, not mastery of innovation. Politics becomes the elevator, while legitimate business becomes a staircase missing half its steps.
It creates a psychology of survival. Here, the man in agbada is celebrated more than the man in overalls who runs a factory. The senator is glorified more than the technocrat who builds an industry. Children grow up aspiring to shake hands with ministers rather than designing the next African megacorporation. As one Igala saying warns, “he who chases the shadow may lose the substance.” Many Nigerians pursue the shadow of influence and abandon the substance of enterprise.
The consequences are bitter. A nation of rental wealth emerges; people earning from the system, not building the system. Our economic destiny shrinks into a competition of political seats rather than an orchestra of innovation, entrepreneurship, and industrial expansion. While countries like China, India, and Rwanda produce global business powerhouses, Nigeria produces political landlords who own the gate to opportunity.
Even our regulatory framework serves as both gatekeeper and executioner. Bureaucracy becomes a maze where the honest are lost and the dishonest thrive. Power supply flickers like a nervous candle. Regulatory agencies act like toll gates, not facilitators. Market unpredictability suffocates startups like premature births. A man trying to build a business in Nigeria often feels like a fisherman casting his net in a storm without a compass.
Yet hope is not dead. Beneath the noise of political ambition, a new tribe is rising; tech innovators in Yaba, agripreneurs in Lokoja and Makurdi, creators of fashion empires in Aba and Lagos, bold investors stretching their hands beyond Nigeria’s borders. They represent the Nigeria that could be the Nigeria that should have been. As Pastor Chris Oyakhilome once said, “You cannot imprison light; it will always find a crack to shine through.” These new minds are the cracks through which tomorrow is already shining.
But let us not deceive ourselves: unless Nigeria deliberately dismantles the shrine of political wealth accumulation and erects a sanctuary for enterprise, the future may remain a repetition of the past. The nation must decide whether political office should continue to be the quickest road to affluence, or whether innovation, industry, and entrepreneurship will finally be allowed to breathe.
The world respects nations that produce thinkers, builders, inventors, and creators; not only nations that produce powerful men. If Nigeria truly desires greatness, it must unshackle itself from the myth that influence is prosperity. Wealth built from political access evaporates when regimes change; but wealth built from enterprise becomes legacy.
The question remains will Nigeria continue nurturing political tycoons who feed on state power, or will it summon the courage to birth business titans who feed the world? The future of the nation hangs on the answer.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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