Abstract
Having established the importance of the political economy approach as a framework to analyse federalism in Nigeria, this chapter presents a detailed analysis of the structure of the Nigerian political economy and its great influence on the politics and society. In this regard, attention is paid to the salient features of Nigeria’s political economy, namely, over-dependence on oil and economic statism. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the inherent contradictions in Nigeria’s oil-centric economy, the impact of oil rents on Nigerian politics, as well as impacts on the federal system. The centrality of oil to the political economy of the country, and the intrinsic relationship between this natural resource and the Nigerian state cannot be overemphasised. The state’s pre-eminent role in the distribution of the country’s resources, especially the oil wealth, is at the heart of the practice of federalism in Nigeria.
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- 1.
According to Rodney (1972, p. 185), the West African Produce Board paid Nigerians £16.15s for a ton of palm oil in 1946 and sold that through the Ministry of Food for £95, which was nearer to the world market price. Groundnuts were bought for £15 per ton by the Boards and later sold in Britain at £110 per ton.
- 2.
Indigenous businesspeople are referred to as commercial capitalists because they lack a productive base of their own in any real economic sense, only profiting from produce buying and selling. For more on the activities of this class in relation to the Nigerian economy, see Turner, T. (1978), ‘Commercial Capitalism and the 1975 Coup’, in Panter-Brick, S. K. (ed.), Soldiers and Oil: The Political Transformation of Nigeria, London: Frank Cass; and Williams, G. (1976), ‘Nigeria: A Political Economy’, in Williams, G. (ed.), Nigeria: Economy and Society, London: Rex Collings.
- 3.
Beblawi, H. (1987), ‘The Rentier State in the Arab World’, in Beblawi, H. and Luciani, G. (eds.), The Rentier State, London: Croom Helm. This work has been re-published in Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Fall 1987), pp. 383–398; and in Luciani, G. (ed.) (1990), The Arab State, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 85–98. For convenience, therefore, we have chosen to cite the earliest version.
- 4.
Luciani, G. (1987), ‘Allocation vs. Production States’, in Beblawi, H. and Luciani, G. (eds.), The Rentier State, London: Croom Helm, p. 69; This work has been re-published in G. Luciani (ed.) (1990), The Arab State, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. However, we have chosen to cite the earlier version.
- 5.
According to Michael Ross, the name was reputedly coined by The Economist in 1977 to refer to all economic hardships associated with resource exports. See Ross, M. (1999), ‘The Political Economy of the Resource Curse’, World Politics 51 (January), pp. 279–322.
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Babalola, D. (2019). Oil Centrism and Nigeria’s Political Economy. In: The Political Economy of Federalism in Nigeria. Federalism and Internal Conflicts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05493-9_3
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