The Development Clock

Nigeria has been improving. Slowly. Keep to the pace of the last 27 years and how long until its governance catches up with the rest of the world?

186years

That is what the World Bank's scores from 1996 to 2023 work out to. Hold this pace and Nigeria arrives at the world average somewhere around 2210.

How we work it out

  1. Where we started. Nigeria scored −1.225 in 1996. The world average sits at zero, so that is how far back we began: 1.225 points.
  2. How far we have come. By 2023 the score was −1.070. 27 years of work, 0.155 points closed. About an eighth of the gap.
  3. The pace. Divide one by the other. 0.155 points over 27 years is 0.00574 points a year.
  4. What is left. Still 1.070 points behind. At 0.00574 a year, that is 186 years.

The governance score is the average of the World Bank's six Worldwide Governance Indicators: voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. Scores run from about −2.5 to +2.5.

Nigeria's score against the world average

The shaded space between the line and zero is the part still to close. Twenty-eight years of it.

Source: World Bank, Worldwide Governance Indicators (comparable series, 1996 to 2023). Hover a point for the exact score.

How to read it

  • This is arithmetic on the record, nothing cleverer. It assumes the next few decades look like the last three, and they do not have to.
  • The World Bank scores countries against each other, and resets the average to zero every year. So zero is a moving target. Catching up means catching up with everyone else, not just beating our own past.
  • The reading swings. Hard. With data up to 2015 it read about 81 years; with data up to 2022, about 514. When progress is this slow, a small move in the score throws the number around, which is exactly why we run it every year instead of quoting one figure and walking away.
  • Worth saying plainly: the 0.155 points gained since 1996 is smaller than the World Bank's own margin of error for Nigeria, roughly 0.15 to 0.25. Measured governance has barely moved.
  • We stop at 2023. The 2024 figures were re-estimated and cannot be lined up against earlier years yet, so they sit this one out.
Nigeria's governance score by year

Keeping it running

When the World Bank publishes new scores, we add them and the clock moves. Alongside each update we want to log what actually happened that year, the currency decisions and subsidy changes and elections, and what each one did to people. Some of what is already in the record:

If you want this record to still be here in ten years, that is the part we need help with: tracking events as they happen, putting them in context, and feeding each new year into the clock.

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Already in the record

  • January 2012Partial subsidy removal (Occupy Nigeria)
  • May 2016Subsidy price adjustment ₦86.5→₦145
  • May 2023Tinubu: 'subsidy is gone'
  • June 2023Naira floated