The Chief Executive Officer of the Nigeria Economic Summit Group, NESG, Dr. Tayo Aduloju has said that Nigeria must be strong political, economic and social institutions to achieve its economic growth objectives.

According to Aduloju, building a strong nation requires three key pillars: strong political institutions, strong economic institutions, and strong social institutions, all led by effective leadership.



He stated this during a panel discussion at Vanguard’s Economic Discourse themed “Nigeria’s Economic Outlook 2025: Hardship and Pathways to Sustainable Recovery.”

He said: “When you said Nigeria’s problems are caused by NESG. So the first thing is, how you define a problem, to a great extent, it determines whether you can solve it. Nigeria’s problems are economics, but they are not first economics; the economics of our problem is a subset of how we have defined the problem.

So the problem is, Nigeria has failed to pursue its national development as a responsible sovereign. What that means, is that the political elite, the business elite, and any other elites that may exist, including the military elite, have y jointly by action or inaction in a conspiracy of slowing down, or in some cases mitigating Nigeria’s economic development.

“And this is an important truth to first accept that we are here by choice, not the choice of others, but by our collective choice that nothing happening in Nigeria because just somebody outside the world wished it on us. Because, from Yemi’ Kale’ s example of the case studies, if it was wished upon those countries, they won’t be where they are”.

How to build a nation

“Then the question then is, how do you build a strong nation state? You build it on three pillars, strong political institutions, strong economic institutions, strong social institutions, and these institutions must be led by certain type of leadership. You are discussing prayer a few minutes ago. One of the scriptures from one of the holy books says that where there is no vision, the people perish. In fact, there’s another translation that says, where there is no vision, no redemptive vision, and the nation perishes. So it matters what people collectively see. So as I see the problem, the foundations of the problem is, whilst we were clear in 1960 as to the nation we wanted to build and the trajectory needed to take. It seems as if we’ve lost our way. The political institutions create a political agenda and a political culture that does not support the economic agenda that we build.

So, Dr Kale was pointing to a series of development plans that the political class does not own and has never been committed to execute beyond their term in office. So once there’s a political transition, the plan is thrown away and a new government comes in afresh. The nations we are discussing, back to your benchmark, succeeded in prosecuting development agenda over the longer term. So political institutions must own, national development agenda where all of us have reached a consensus with the vision and all of us are committed, in spite of political transitions, to go on that journey together.

“Now, once you don’t have that, just imagine, PDP governed Nigeria from 1999 to 2015 as a ruling party. Under that ruling party, we had the vision 2020 , under the ruling party the government after that , pursued a seven point agenda that started moving away from vision 2020 . Under that government, a vice president of a cabinet, where the president dies, moves from seven point agenda to transformation agenda. And so the inability to prosecute our consensus around what is development in Nigeria. How do you deliver it? Where does it go? This is the problem”.




https://www.vanguardngr.com/2025/04/nigeria-must-build-strong-political-economic-social-institutions-nesg-ceo/