Norway found oil around the same time Nigeria’s boom was taking off, but instead of spending the money as it came in, they locked most of it into a sovereign wealth fund and only touch a small percentage of the returns each year. That fund is now worth over $1.7 trillion, essentially owned by every Norwegian. Nigeria took the opposite path: spend now, save later (if ever), and “later” rarely came. Same resource, wildly different institutions, wildly different outcomes fifty years on.

Genuine question: was this really a policy failure Nigeria could have avoided, or were the political incentives always going to make this outcome inevitable?