Classical economics rests on a foundational assumption so obvious it rarely gets stated: money flows to where it is most productive. Capital, like water, finds its level. Savings become investment, investment becomes output, output becomes wealth. The system is self-correcting. Leave it alone and it works.
Nigeria has spent sixty years proving that assumption wrong. Not modifying it. Not complicating it. Disproving it.
We have a better theory. Three words. A street aphorism so precise it shames most development economics: money miss road. Not stolen — lost. Not misallocated — disoriented. The phrase implies that money had a destination, that a road existed, and that something happened to sever the connection between the two. It is a diagnosis, not a complaint. And it is the most accurate description of what inflation, at its deepest level, actually is.
“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”
John Maynard Keynes wrote those words in 1919 in The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He was quoting Lenin — and Lenin’s claim was not primarily about confiscation. It was about destruction. What Lenin understood, and what Keynes recognised as the most dangerous insight of his age, was that inflation does not merely impoverish people. It dissolves the structures that make a society possible. It attacks the shared meanings, the frameworks of trust, the invisible architecture of obligation and expectation through which people agree to live together rather than prey on one another. It works, Lenin noted, in a way that not one man in a million is able to diagnose. By the time the population understands what has happened to them, the damage is already irreversible. The road is already gone. Keynes was writing about Weimar Germany. He was warning every government thereafter. We did not listen.
Our inflation history is a chronicle of that debauchery. In the 1960s, inflation averaged below five percent — the young federation was still spending on faith. By the 1970s, oil money and government expansion pushed it toward 15 percent. The 1980s’ structural adjustment era delivered 23 percent, then 40 percent, then in 1993 it hit 57 percent. The 1995 naira crisis produced 73 percent — the highest we have ever recorded. The 2000s brought relative calm, averaging around 12 percent. Then the familiar cycle resumed: 15 percent in 2016, 18 percent in 2020, 34 percent at its peak in 2024, before the National Bureau of Statistics rebased its methodology and the official number fell, conveniently, to 15 percent. The lived reality in the markets did not move accordingly.
What that graph actually traces is not price levels. It is the Lenin timetable applied to one country over six decades. First the arithmetic: money supply growing at 53 percent against GDP growth of four percent, the 49-point difference showing up not in spreadsheets but in the price of garri, the cost of school fees, the vanishing purchasing power of a civil servant’s salary between payday and the end of the month. Then the social dissolution: the frameworks of trust and obligation that once made collective life possible quietly dismantled, not by a single catastrophe but by the compounding effect of millions of people learning, year after year, that the state holding their currency cannot be trusted to preserve its value. Not one man in a million diagnosed it. They simply adapted. And adaptation, in this case, is the name we give to the road being abandoned.
Look at what surrounds us now. A petrol station attendant demands dollars. A landlord prices a Lagos apartment in naira but adjusts it monthly. A mother converting her salary to goods at the market before Thursday because she has learned that Friday prices will be higher. None of these people are economists. All of them are expressing, in the only language available to them, that the naira is no longer a reliable store of value — that the road between earning and spending has become so short, so treacherous, that they cannot afford to stay on it longer than necessary.
This is not merely an economic crisis. It is a crisis of the structures that hold a society together. Money, properly understood, is frozen social agreement. It works because enough people in a given territory share sufficient trust in the institution issuing it to accept it for goods and services they cannot immediately verify. That trust is not abstract. It is the daily aggregation of millions of small decisions to believe that the naira in your pocket tonight will mean roughly the same thing tomorrow morning. When that belief collapses — not all at once, but in slow, compounding increments — money stops facilitating exchange and becomes the object of a survival calculation. It misses its road not because anyone stole it, but because the road itself has been dismantled.
The military governments of the 1980s and 1990s understood this, in their way. How else do we explain generals placing their looted wealth in foreign bank accounts — men who controlled the very country they were looting? They were not irrational. They were making a precise trust calculation: the naira is not reliable enough to store what we have taken. In doing so, they were completing the circuit of destruction. Corruption of this kind is not merely greed. As I have argued in this column before, it is the clearest expression of lost faith in the project one has been entrusted to run. It is an insurance policy against the very failure one has been hired to prevent. When you debauch the currency of the country you govern and then move your personal wealth out of that currency, you have told everyone, in the only language power speaks, what you actually believe about the future.
Which brings me to 1951.
Five years after the regional representatives who would later build this nation first sat together, the Western and Southern regions were asked to contribute to the infrastructural development of the North. The request: £2 million from a combined revenue of £9,250,000. They not only agreed — they raised the contribution to £3 million. The British colonial administration, remarkably, rejected the increase.
Consider what that moment was. These were not wealthy men making a comfortable donation. West Africa in the 1950s was poor in ways we have forgotten. What they were investing was not money. They were investing faith — faith that a collective project could be built across kingdoms, languages, and histories that had no prior obligation to each other. They were making a deposit into a ‘trust well’ they could not yet see, for a return they could not yet calculate, on behalf of a Nigeria that did not yet exist.
That is the opposite of money miss road. That is money finding its deepest road — the road of collective future-building, the road that makes a society rather than merely an economy.
We have been dismantling that road ever since. Not in a single catastrophic act, but in the accumulated decisions of those who inherited the faith of 1951 and converted it into personal insurance. Every naira printed beyond what the economy can absorb is a withdrawal from that trust well. Every inflation figure that makes savings worthless is a message to ordinary Nigerians that the collective project is not worth their confidence. Every general who moved his money abroad was telling his citizens: I do not believe what I am asking you to believe.
Lenin identified the weapon. Keynes named it for the world. And the street philosopher who coined moni miss road described its specific wound on this society — with the precision that only those living inside the destruction can achieve.
What 1951 tells us is not that Nigerians are capable of generosity. It tells us that money once knew its road — that there existed, briefly, a shared confidence that collective investment would produce a collective future. That confidence is what inflation destroys, year by year, naira by naira, in a way that not one man in a million is able to diagnose until it is gone. It is gone. The work now is not monetary policy. It is the far harder work of rebuilding the belief that there is a Nigeria worth investing in — not abroad, not in dollars, but here, in this currency, among these people.
OLOUDAMILARE EBENIZA
Damilare Ebeniza studied Political Science and International Relations in Nigeria, Benin Republic, and France, with a research focus on Nigerian history, economy, and foreign politics. He has experience as a conference interpreter and external relations management across Chad, Niger, Mali, and Guinea Conakry, for governmental, regional and international organisations in West Africa. He is an analyst for West African Democracy Radio in Dakar, Senegal and actively contributes to critical dialogues shaping the region’s socio-political landscape. Proficient in French, English, and four additional non-Nigerian African languages, he embodies a commitment to cross-cultural understanding and effective communication. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com
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