In periods of oil prices hovering around $100 per barrel, Nigeria scoops approximately $200 million per day in revenues from the global oil market. Who are the major beneficiaries of these proceeds?
Roughly two decades ago, 58 per cent of Nigerians were living in absolute poverty. That was equivalent to about 70 million people unable to spend 98 naira ($1.25 adjusted for cost of living across countries i.e., purchasing power parity) per person per day on food items and other basic needs, enough to buy a light lunch, pay for two haircuts or half a gallon of petrol in Nigeria, but not a medium-sized Starbucks cup of coffee in the United States or Costa coffee in the United Kingdom. Then, there was no Nigerian on Forbes’ global list of billionaires. Cut to 2010, these figures have risen: the number
of poor from 69 million in 2004 to more than 100 million and arguably, the number of billionaires from zero to two; and by 2020 the…
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