Nigeria

Located in West Africa and bordering the Atlantic, Nigeria is a big country that occupies 356,667 square miles with a total population of 168 million. Nigeria is abundant in natural resources like coal, gold, lead, iron, salt, copper, and zinc, but it is best known as a big producer of oil. Thanks to its size, population, and resources, Nigeria is dubbed as “the giant of Africa” (Falola, 4). According to World Bank Data of 2010, Nigeria has an annual percentage growth rate as 8.0%, one of the world’s highest rate. Yet, its poverty still remains high. The National Bureau of Statistics gave that 60.9% of Nigerians are living on less than a $1 dollar a day (BBC). The poverty problem that Nigeria is facing traces its origins back to the slave trade and colonialism, and evolves till today.
The most important origin in making Nigerian poverty history is slavery. Slave trade in Africa started when four hundred slaves were shipped out of the Niger Delta by the Portuguese in 1480 (Falola, 31). During the eighteenth century, sugar production, gold mining, and the production of staple crops blossomed in many parts of Americas; which escalated the demand for slavery (Mann, 31). As a result, more than 3.5 million slaves were shipped from Nigeria to America. (Schwab, 12). While slavery brought Europeans a huge amount of profits, Nigeria and the rest of African continent suffered a great loss in population which could contribute in developing their country. Young healthy men, who captured as slaves, could have worked daily with their families in producing manufactured goods like kitchen utensils and pots, or farming to trade in the markets. Trading in developed markets could create a network that promoted interactions among the various states. This helped to diversify and strengthen the states’ economy. Unfortunately, Europeans introduced slave trade to the independently developing Africa and made it the top trade above all other trade. Europeans would not be able to have an