Nigeria The Chaotic Behemoth

It is hard not to be captivated by Nigeria.

I have been looking at a lot of global economic and demographic charts lately, and Nigeria’s data is just sexy: a massive market of 230 million people—one in every six Africans is Nigerian. A labor dividend with a median age of just 18. Once the largest economy on the continent. In my mind, this was supposed to be the African success story—a nation that moved past warlord chaos to leverage its oil wealth for an industrial takeoff, a rising Wakanda.

With expectations of finding the world’s next growth engine, I started digging into the underlying logic of the country. But as I peeled back the macro data, what lay before me wasn’t an organically growing modern state, but a high-entropy mess that defies standard economic theory.

To truly underst…