By Benard Ifeanyi Odoh
In the grand theatre of economic transformation, Nigeria is a paradox wrapped in potential. We are a country where billions have been spent—over $30 billion in development aid, trillions of naira in infrastructure—and yet, 133 million of our citizens remain trapped in multidimensional poverty.
The roads are being built, airports are commissioned with fanfare, and master plans are designed with foreign consultants in five-star hotels. Still, the average Nigerian, from Ogoja to Onitsha, is yet to experience anything close to prosperity.
The problem is not that we haven’t tried; it’s that we’ve been trying the wrong things, or perhaps, trying good things in the wrong order. We have focused almost entirely on what Clayton Christensen aptly called “push strategies”—pouring resources into infrastructure and institutions—without asking the fundamental question: is there a market to absorb and sustain these interventions?
This is the heart of Christensen’s argument in The Prosperity Paradox, where he postulates that true prosperity does not come from aid, charity, or even government programmes. It comes from market-creating innovations that make previously unaffordable or inaccessible products and services available to the masses. It comes when non-consumers—people who desperately need something but cannot access it—are transformed into consumers through innovations that reimagine delivery, pricing, and utility.
Nigeria’s poverty puzzle persists, not because we lack resources or intelligence, but because we have failed to build ecosystems that serve the vast majority who are excluded from traditional markets. In other words, we’re building skyscrapers in the clouds, while the foundation below is crumbling.
Take our agriculture sector, for example. Despite spending over 2 trillion annually and declaring “food security” every other year, Nigeria still imports over $10 billion worth of food. We grow tomatoes in Kaduna, but import tomato paste from China. We export raw cocoa but import Swiss chocolate.
This isn’t just economic self-harm; it is a direct consequence of failing to innovate around market creation. Meanwhile, over 80 million Nigerians are excluded from formal financial systems.
Not because banks don’t exist, but because those banks were not designed for them. If you ask a tomato seller in Aba to open a current account with a 5,000 minimum balance and two referees, you are not creating access—you are perpetuating exclusion, in a necktie.
But there is hope. Across Africa, the tide is shifting—often not because of government policy, but because of market-creating entrepreneurs. Consider M-KOPA, the Kenyan-born company that evolved from selling solar kits to offering smartphones through a pay-as-you-go model. With less than $30 upfront, a low-income family in Nairobi or Ibadan can now own a smartphone, access digital banking, health services, and e-learning.
That is not aid; that is capitalism with empathy. Or d.light, which has deployed solar home systems to over 30 million users across 72 countries using flexible payment plans—lighting up lives and economies that would otherwise be stuck in the dark. And then there’s the story of rural Zimbabwe, where a $15/month lease-to-own model for electric tricycles has empowered women to run logistics businesses, gaining not only income but respect in communities that once limited their economic roles. These are not unicorn startups chasing Silicon Valley valuations. These are businesses creating wealth by solving problems for people most others ignore.
Now let’s come closer to home—the Southeast of Nigeria. This region is often celebrated for its enterprise, but too often excluded from national development frameworks. The Southeast is a paradox of potential—brimming with educated youth, bustling informal markets, and a global diaspora that remits billions, yet suffering from industrial stagnation and poor infrastructure.
We must ask: what would happen if we applied the market-creating lens here? Imagine a land reform agenda that converts dead capital—untitled land—into liquid assets, as Hernando de Soto advocated in Peru.
Imagine diaspora remittances, currently spent largely on consumption, being pooled into a Southeast Innovation Fund that supports scalable ventures in clean energy, affordable housing, AI-driven logistics, or modular food processing. Imagine our polytechnics and universities becoming hubs for demand-driven training—training welders for electric vehicle assembly lines, or data analysts for agro-traceability platforms, instead of producing another 1,000 business administration graduates with nowhere to administrate.
The Southeast could become Nigeria’s pilot zone for development that is not imposed from above, but pulled from the needs below. To achieve this, we must rethink how we think. Our policy elite must stop measuring success by ribbon-cuttings and start measuring impact by lives lifted. We must decentralize innovation funding, allowing local councils and state agencies to identify and back the disruptors in their midst. We must protect local innovators with real IP frameworks and give them access to government procurement contracts—not just political cronies.
Above all, we must abandon the illusion that development is something we do to people. True development happens when people are given the tools, capital, and systems to do it for themselves. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” And in economic terms, the best way to serve others is to create systems where their needs generate real demand and sustainable value.
The truth is that Nigeria’s poverty is not a mystery—it is a market failure. We have built a development architecture that serves only the top 20%, while ignoring the 80 people who would drive prosperity if only given the means.
Innovation is not a luxury. It is the missing middle between potential and progress. To borrow from Wole Soyinka, “You cannot amputate your history and expect to walk bravely into the future.”
We cannot amputate the majority of our people from the economy and expect to walk into development. It is time to stop waiting for prosperity to be delivered from the top. It’s time to build it from the bottom. One market at a time. One innovation at a time. One life at a time.
Prof. Odoh, wrote from the Department of
Applied Geophysics, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka.
