Nigeria's attempts to promote industrialization have been a dismal failure. If modern manufacturing contributed some 3 to 4 percent of Nigeria's GNP at independence in 1960, the share of manufacturing toward the end of the century was still under 10 percent. Nigeria's economic performance is clearly the worst of the cases discussed in this study. Especially puzzling is that Nigeria's rulers apparently channeled billions of the country's oil dollars into industrial development, yet reaped no significant gains. What happened? This chapter finds its answer in the negative role of the neopatrimonial state. Whatever the current regime, the Nigerian state has repeatedly lacked the commitment and the capacity to facilitate economic transformation, as state elites focused their energies on maintaining personal power and on privatizing public resources. The result – to restate a theme emphasized by the late Nigerian intellectual Claude Ake – was not so much that development efforts failed but that they were never really made.

A variety of factors, some more and some less persuasive, may be invoked to explain Nigeria's economic failure. The view that Africa's economic woes are rooted in antiagrarian policies pursued by self-seeking, pro-urban rulers, for example, has only limited applicability to Nigeria. Nigerian agriculture has not performed all that poorly; when it has, the reasons have included factors other than pro-urban policies. More important, this tells us nothing about why industrial growth has also been so poor. Another argument – this one miscast – may stress Nigeria's vulnerability to global economic forces.