Former Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has argued that Nigeria’s persistent growth challenges stem not from a shortage of skilled individuals but from a systemic failure to channel the country’s best talent into productive enterprise.
In an analysis released on Wednesday, El-Rufai presented a political-economy framework that frames the country’s underperformance as a “talent-allocation crisis”—a situation where rational actors gravitate towards rent-seeking because the prevailing incentive structure makes value creation less rewarding than value capture.
“People do not wake up intending to harm their country. They respond rationally to incentives,” El-Rufai wrote. “So the right question for Nigeria is not ‘Why are people corrupt?’ It is: ‘What activities does our system reward most handsomely?’”
The former governor cited economic indicators that he said illustrate the problem: a tax-to-GDP ratio of roughly 8.2 percent, one of the lowest in Africa; informal employment accounting for approximately 93 percent of the labour force; and persistent infrastructure deficits, including an average available grid capacity of just over 5,300 megawatts for a population exceeding 200 million.
According to El-Rufai, these conditions create an environment where the fastest and safest returns accrue not to entrepreneurs building scalable enterprises but to individuals with proximity to state power, regulatory discretion, and political brokerage.
He identified three cumulative ways rent-seeking damages the economy: it absorbs labour and capital without creating output; it acts as a tax on productive activity through delays and informal payments; and, most critically, it diverts the country’s most capable individuals away from entrepreneurship and innovation.
“When the brightest minds are pulled away from production, the quality of entrepreneurship falls, technological progress slows, and the economy’s long-run growth rate declines,” he said.
El-Rufai proposed a reform agenda summarised in a single objective: “Make value creation more rewarding than value capture.”
To achieve this, he outlined a set of measurable targets intended to signal to investors and skilled workers that the returns to productive activity are improving. These include:
· Power availability rising from approximately 5,300 megawatts toward a reliably delivered 8,000 to 10,000 megawatts.
· Port turnaround times falling below four days, with fewer physical interventions.
· Wage employment rising from its current level near 16 percent to between 18 and 20 percent, indicating firm formalisation and scale.
· Tax-to-GDP ratio moving toward 10 percent, driven by digitisation and base broadening rather than enforcement harassment.
· Non-oil exports growing not only in value but also in the number of exporting firms.
“These are not technocratic targets,” El-Rufai said. “They are signals to talent—telling Nigeria’s brightest minds that building, producing, and exporting now pay better than extracting.”
The former governor pointed to recent growth in non-oil exports—including cocoa, fertiliser, cashew, and processed agricultural goods—as evidence that Nigerian firms can compete and scale when incentives are properly aligned.
He concluded that Nigeria’s economic future hinges on a strategic choice between rewarding brokers and rewarding builders.
“If the system rewards brokers over builders, we will continue to underperform,” he said. “If it rewards producers over extractors, growth will follow—rapidly and durably.”
El-Rufai served as Governor of Kaduna State from 2015 to 2023 and previously held positions as Minister of the Federal Capital Territory and as a key figure in the privatization agency, the Bureau of Public Enterprises.
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