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Behavioural Economics

Organising Ability and Progress

Why a People That Cannot Organise Cannot Progress: A Nigerian Case Study

Olamide Eyinla20 Jun 202613 min0

Progress is often spoken about as if it were a question of resources, intelligence, or luck, as if a nation simply needs enough oil, enough graduates, or enough goodwill from history to rise. This is a comforting but mistaken view. At its core, progress is an organisational achievement. It is the accumulated result of millions of small, sustained acts of coordination: people agreeing to show up at the same time, to contribute toward a shared pot, to follow a shared rule even when no one is watching, and to keep doing so long after the excitement of starting has worn off.


The Synthesis

Weekly editorial briefings on Nigerian economics


Trade & AfCFTA

From Market Stalls to Market Power

Building a Structured Trading Sector for Nigeria

Olamide Eyinla · 07 Jun 2026 · 19 min

Walk through Onitsha Main Market, Mile 12 in Lagos, Dawanau in Kano, or Aba's vast leather and textile clusters and one experience overwhelms every other: Nigeria is, at its commercial core, a nation of traders. Trade is the country's social fabric, its principal source of livelihood, and one of its largest economic sectors. Following the National Bureau of Statistics' 2025 rebasing of GDP, which moved the base year from 2010 to 2019 and lifted nominal GDP by roughly 34 percent to ₦372.8 trillion (about US$243 billion) for 2024, the trade sector emerges as the single largest contributor to the economy after agriculture, accounting for 17.37 percent of full-year 2025 GDP, ahead of real estate (13.57 percent), ICT (10.07 percent) and manufacturing (NBS, 2026; Punch, 2026; Africa Check, 2025).


Fiscal Policy

Rivers of Prosperity

How Nigeria Can Turn the Niger and Benue Into Engines of Food Security, Power and Inclusive Growth

Olamide Eyinla · 13 min

The River Niger enters Nigeria from the north-west at Kebbi and flows roughly 1,200 kilometres southward through Niger, Kwara and Kogi states before turning into a vast deltaic fan that empties into the Atlantic. The Benue, which the Tiv historically called bernor 'river of hippos' rises in the Adamawa Plateau of Cameroon, traverses Adamawa, Taraba, Nasarawa, Benue and Kogi, and meets the Niger at Lokoja in a confluence that, by volume, is dominated by the Benue itself. Together the two rivers and their tributaries drain almost two-thirds of Nigeria's land area.

Fiscal Policy

Improving Nigeria’s lagging Sectors: The Private Enterprise Imperative

How Nigerian businesses, in collaboration with all three tiers of Government, can lift the laggard sectors and unlock the next decade of growth

Olamide Eyinla · 24 min

There is a quiet but consequential shift underway in Nigerian economic policy. After decades of treating the private sector as an external constituency to be courted and occasionally taxed, the federal and state governments are increasingly framing private enterprise as the principal delivery vehicle for national development — with government as the enabler, regulator, co-investor, and risk partner. The February 2026 cooperation agreement between the Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning and the International Finance Corporation, designed to mobilise a multi-billion-dollar pipeline of Public-Private Partnership projects across transport, energy, technology and sanitation, is the clearest signal yet that this shift has moved from rhetoric to architecture. [1]


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