As a policy objective, the attainment of food security in Nigeria began facing challenges prior to independence when oil exportation began in 1958. But the challenges became pronounced and persistent after the commencement of large-scale oil exports in the early 1970s, when the country nearly abandoned agriculture in pursuit of newfound oil wealth. Self-sufficiency in food production and agricultural export earnings, aided by widespread cultivation of food crops and regional specialisation in cash crops – the cocoa mountains in the west, the oil palm and kernel heaps in the east, and groundnut pyramids in the north – began to diminish and disappear respectively. Within a few years after independence in 1960, the agricultural sector transitioned from a net foreign exchange earner to net foreign exchange drain.

Oil wealth comes with a caveat-depend on it excessively and be buffeted by oil market volatility. The 2014 oil price crash revealed that Nigeria did not heed this warning. The country’s expenditure forecasts are based on an assumed oil price so that the government was caught flatfooted when the crash began around June. Under duress, public officials eventually revealed how financially irresponsible governance was during the years of plenty: after a tussle with the President, State Governors shared oil profits stowed in a “rainy day” account called the Excess Crude Account (ECA) amongst themselves; they allegedly also hindered the growth of the country’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. It does not seem like those hard-won funds were spent in the public’s interest-reports detailing several state governments’ inability to fund public investments and pay public servants’ salaries have continued to arise into 2018.

The World Health Organization (WHO) emphasises that tobacco use is a significant hurdle to public health and development gains worldwide, as it imposes significant economic costs on countries both in terms of direct medical care for adults and lost productivity. Cigarette smoking and other forms of tobacco use impose a large and growing public health burden globally and in Nigeria. Globally, tobacco use is the most preventable cause of death. Statistics show that tobacco use caused 100 million deaths in the twentieth century, and if current trends continue unchecked, one billion people (about 10 million, one in six adults, per year) will die from tobacco-related causes in the twenty-first century (Blecher and Ross 2013). Nearly 80 per cent of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, especially in Asia (ibid.). Presently in Nigeria, more than 17,500 deaths are recorded each year on account of tobacco-related diseases; that is about 207 men and 130 women per week (Tobacco Atlas 2015). In the past, tobacco use and tobacco control in Africa received little attention relative to other regions and health issues. This was due to the perceived low smoking prevalence in Africa in addition to the more immediate need for interventions against infectious diseases. However, the trends are quickly changing. With improving economic growth and health in Africa, the number of smokers and cigarettes smoked in the region is rising. In Nigeria, smoking prevalence is growing at an average of 4 per cent each year; from 11.3 per cent in 2000 to 17.4 per cent in 2015 (World Bank 2017). According to data from Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) and the GlobalData Plc, a total of 920 million cigarette packs were sold in Nigeria in 2015, of which 74 per cent were produced domestically.

Nigeria has significant renewable water resources; however, the current reality is that most of it is poorly utilized and managed, thus raising important sustainability questions. There are several concerns associated with the water situation in the country such as pollution, flooding, poor drainage infrastructure, etc. All these have dire water-poverty, socio-economic, health and livelihood implications for Nigerians. This discussion paper identifies the absence of a properly functioning regulatory regime in Nigeria’s Water Resources sector - with the ensuing pattern of open-access water use in the country - as a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed. It briefly maps out some specifics of the current situation within Nigeria’s Water Resources sector. Utilising a simple steady-state economic framework that shows the implications of open access use of natural resources, it goes on to explain the sustainability implications of the current water resource use-patterns in Nigeria. Drawing on the points raised, the paper concludes with a few high-level recommendations for water sustainability in Nigeria.

Access to finance has been considered to be one of the important factors in influencing firms’ real activities and in promoting aggregates. However, literature on the relationship between finance and firm-level productivity is almost non-existent for African countries. This paper fills this gap by using cross-sectional firm-level data to estimate the effect of access to finance on labour productivity, total factor productivity (TFP), and the stochastic frontier trans-log model. This study also estimates an instrumental variable model - two-stage least square estimator to address potential endogeneity bias between access to credit and firms’ productivity. The results obtained show that the lack of access to finance, especially overdraft facilities negatively affects the productivity of firms in Africa. Also, smaller firms and sole-proprietorships are mostly affected because they have less access to finance. This study suggests that the development of a balanced financial system should be of topmost priority to policy makers. This ensures that more finance is channelled towards those firms whose productivity depends heavily on the availability of finance irrespective of their characteristics. This would result in firms increasing their investments in productivity-enhancing activities, which would benefit long-term economic growth.