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The book A Century of Plenty opens with a bold question:

Can every person on Earth enjoy at least the living standards of a modern Switzerland by 2100?

It is an audacious question. But it forces clarity. Progress is not accidental. Prosperity is not magic. Growth is engineered.

Reading that question, I asked myself a Nigerian version:

Can Nigeria achieve $14,554 – the current average global nominal GDP per capita in the next century?

At first glance, the question feels detached from current realities. Nigeria’s GDP per capita sits below $2,000.

We face currency devaluation and volatility, fiscal and monetary pressure, energy and infrastructure constraints, insecurity, structural unemployment and economic inactivity.

But the more important question for investors, policymakers, and business leaders is not whether the target feels distant. It is whether the mechanics of getting there are understood.

The book A Century of Plenty asks whether every person on Earth can enjoy at least the living standards of a modern Switzerland by 2100. The answer for Nigeria is No. Its conclusion is not utopian; it is structural.

Growth happens when four engines align: Economic productivity, Human capital and innovation, Urbanisation and integration, and Energy and infrastructure expansion – the Progress Machine!

That framework is not abstract theory to me. It mirrors my own family’s trajectory and Nigeria’s unfinished story.

A century ago, my grandparents traded along the Niger Delta and the Gulf of Guinea. Commerce connected communities. Markets created scale. Integration generated opportunity.

Then, in the early 1950s, oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Olobiri. That discovery plugged Nigeria into the global energy economy. Energy investment created infrastructure. Infrastructure created jobs.

My father, without a university degree but with strong work ethics, discipline and knowledge of the terrain, was recruited into early oil exploration.

The income he earned funded education, among other things. Education changed the generational trajectory. I went on to receive a university education in the United Kingdom and worked in highly reputable institutions at the core of the British economy.

That arc–trade, energy, education, exposure – is the progress machine in action. Nigeria has activated pieces of it before. The problem is that we never sustained it.

From a number lens, the data tells a sobering story:

The economy has expanded nominally at times, but not consistently in real, productivity–driven terms. Population growth has outpaced income growth. That is a structural imbalance.

Redistribution debates dominate headlines – trade subsidies, transfers, FX interventions – but the harder question is avoided: how do we expand output per person at scale?

No country has redistributed itself into prosperity. Every country that has sustained poverty reduction has done so through productivity growth – this is the same for China, Singapore, Malaysia, India, etc.