Indian merchants who knew Sheikn Rashid recall that his favourite saying was,
“What’s good for the merchants is good for Dubai.”
– Sheikn Rashid
The motto famous in Dubai as the philosophy behind the Making of the Megapolis. They also recall what a thrill it was for Emiratis each time a new merchant arrived to set up shop. Just sixty years ago Dubai’s population scraped a living by picking dates, diving for pearls, or sailing in wooden dhows to trade with Iran and India.

Dubai’s waterways: Dhows pictured on the city’s creek was once the centre of Dubai’s pearl trade

The emirate went from desert backwater to the Manhattan of the Middle East in just 50 years
But today, Dubai is everything the rest of the Arab world is not, with its unfathomably high skyscrapers, matched only in size by its vast, sprawling shopping malls and its residents’ bulging bank balances. As at 2013, the UAE’s per capita income of $48,000 was one of the highest in the world. A robust economy with perhaps the best infrastructures on the planet, one of the safest place to live or do business in the middle east, and generally, one of the safest sanctuaries of global capital. Achieved simply on the back of sound reasoning by good leadership, with a focus on establishing an economy beyond petroleum exports: using their oil wealth to invest in trade and industry for profit in accordance with basic principles of capitalism.

Dubai City
Like Dubai sixty years ago, the economic setbacks of Nigeria can still be addressed if Nigerians can look beyond cheap petrodollar and its criminal enterprise of bribery and corruption, as the nation’s main source of wealth creation. For which the consequence of this chronic condition has over the years impeded the incentives for creativity and the diversification of the Nigerian economy, which otherwise by now should have resulted in the economic independence from petroleum exports, and could have provided revenue generation in multiple growth sectors.
It remains shocking but not surprising that even amongst many of Nigeria’s enlightened youths and elites, a lack of the will or capacity to aspire beyond oil revenue and the followership of the downline of corrupt element still strives. However, from the leadership perspective, the main perpetrators have been myopic leaders whose years of leading with extreme incompetence, gross lack of commercial awareness and arrogance have not allowed for any well-grounded vision beyond the petrodollar.
Indeed, like Muhammadu Buhari, the quality of being perceived, to be honest, or having strong moral principles: integrity, is an attractive attribute of a leader. However, for the President of a country like Nigeria, with severe economic challenges and a rapidly growing youth population, a lot more substance is required for progressive leadership. Until Nigerians elect leaders that could radically embrace policies that promote commercial growth and create business-friendly environments with conditions suitable for domestic and international businesses alike, Nigeria would remain drowned in acute economic ignorance.

Only capitalism can save Nigerians
Undoubtedly, It is absolutely essential to plug the notoriously occurring leakages in the economy, however, with a population of 180 million people with a youth unemployment rate of 13.41% as at 2017 and increasing, a focus on revenue creation to stimulate growth is critically essential. But to date, efforts towards the regime’s myopic economic policy of simply fighting corruption, and its unstructured attempt to overhaul weak institutions have been largely diluted by nepotism and lopsided political prejudice, and as a result, has failed to produce any tangible outcome to count towards poverty reduction.
Sadly, after 4years of expectations, Nigerians are back to the choice of the same narrow mission that has proven to have little or no significant impact on the advancement of the common man in Nigeria. Generally, the efforts of Buhari’s 2015 -2019 regime simply lacked the prerequisite qualities needed to improve the welfare of Nigerians: an unsatisfactory outcome.
As Nigeria heads towards the general elections on February 16th 2019, where Nigerians would be faced with a binary choice, between the incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar, a Former Vice President of Nigeria, considered to be an advocate of Capitalism, I close by borrowing a famous quote from Shakespeare.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”
– William Shakespeare.
Should Nigeria embrace Capitalism? Like Dubai, is what’s good for the merchants also good for Nigeria?