Nigeria’s Ruling Class and the Development Question: A Case of Piloting without a Compass

It is unimaginable for an aircraft to be piloted to safety without a compass, not even with a faulty one. This paper shows how and why the Nigerian ruling class, those occupying the driver’s seat of the Nigerian state neither possess a developmental compass nor appreciate the need to have one. It argues that every political system breeds its type of ruling class for which the nature and character of the ruling class depend on the nature and character of the political system. It is the nature and character of a ruling class that eventually determines its contributions to her nation’s socioeconomic development. The paper thus examines the contributions of the Nigerian ruling class to the country’s political and socioeconomic development and finds that there has been a case of contributing to the systematic political and socioeconomic underdevelopment of Nigeria through the process of primitive capital accumulation over the years since political independence in 1960. From the purview of the Marxist theory of classes and its major antagonist of Elite theory, the paper argues that the Nigerian ruling class as presently constituted, is taking the nation nowhere and concludes with recommendations driven by insights from the Developmental State Paradigm to present an agenda for the Nigerian ruling class to move the nation forward