AELEX 19th Annual Lecture Themed “The Rule Of Law & Economic Development: The Nigerian Experience.”

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KEYNOTE LECTURE BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, THE IMMEDIATE PAST VICE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE 19TH AELEX ANNUAL LECTURE ON THE 14TH OF OCTOBER, 2025

Protocols

Let me begin with gratitude to the Partners and members of AELEX for the very kind invitation to deliver this year’s lecture. And also to commend this firm for the very many years of institution building and value creation. Your firm has proved a point that we can build strong institutions, private or public, where there is an ethos of professionalism, integrity, and an openness to respond to changing times. I must say that this is by far one of the best law firms anywhere in the world.

Second only, of course, to Simmons Cooper. Thank you very much. I am to speak on the topic, “The Rule of Law and Economic Development: the Nigerian Experience.”

Let me first give a working definition of the rule of law and its context in this lecture. Looking at the context of the rule of law, looking at your faces, I am sure that you are not here to listen to a law professor give a full exegesis of the rule of law, the theories of the rule of law from Dicey to Joseph Raz and those are even only the modern ones. We can go back to Classical, Medieval, and the Enlightenment.

But I think that most of us sort of understand what the rule of law is, whether we’re lawyers or not. And I think that a simple definition is that the rule of law really means that laws are clear, that they are fairly applied, and that they are equally enforced. So people, businesses, and governments all play by the same rules. No one, not even the government or its agencies, is above the law. Nobody is above the law.

The rule of law should then give investors, businesses, and citizens the confidence that rules, not power, not influence, decide outcomes, whether those are institutional outcomes or outcomes in cases and all of that, in cases before the courts. To be credible, it’s important that disputes must be resolved by independent courts and then bound by laid-down precedents and legislation. And enforcement must be certain.

But I think that the purest constitutional lawyers here will find that I have conflated two theoretical concepts in my definition, namely the rule of law and the administration of justice. So the rule of law, meaning that everyone must be subject to the law, that laws are clear, predictable, fairly applied, and then the administration of justice, meaning that the courts, the police, and the regulatory agencies actually enforce laws fairly, predictably, quickly, and without corruption. So my excuse for merging both is that, except for just bare theoretical analysis, the rule of law and efficient administration of justice go hand-in-hand.

In fact, sometimes they’re used interchangeably. So, the best laws are useless if the mode of enforcement is weak, if it’s corrupt or inefficient, and if it simply does not deliver the results.

My second preliminary point is about the broader legal and policy environment. So, beyond the rule of law itself, we should consider how our entire body of laws, of institutions, from market rules to labour laws to socioeconomic rights, and the institutions that interpret, apply, and enforce them, can create an environment for economic development or an environment in which economic development thrives. But first, what do we then mean by economic development? Again, I will adopt a very simple description. Economic development means progress, the process by which a country improves the economic, political, and social well-being of its people.

So in practical terms, this would typically involve sustained growth in incomes and jobs, expansion of infrastructure, better education and health, and an increase in opportunities generally. But I must say that too often we equate economic development with big business and investment. We talk about economic development only in terms of what satisfies big business or what pleases big business and investment.

But true development is really about the real improvement and the quality of lives of ordinary people. And that’s a far more complex and involved task than simply incentivizing investments. And it requires us to focus on people rather than just merely on programs and projects.

The third point I would like to make is that there is now hardly any credible argument against the proposition that the enforcement of the rule of law is important for economic growth. I don’t think there’s any real credible argument against that anymore. Study after study has clearly shown that when contracts are enforced, when businesses can trade and invest with confidence, when property rights are secure, people are willing to save, to build and innovate.

When corruption and favouritism are curbed, resources flow to the most productive uses, not just to the most influential or the most powerful. When regulations are clear and transparent, consistently and agnostically enforced, it is easier to attract foreign direct investment and to stimulate domestic entrepreneurship. Also, to encourage formalization of businesses, which in turn, as you know, expands the tax base and provides resources for financing the public goods that we all want and that the ordinary man wants.

When disputes are fairly resolved, investors stay, and they can expand instead of taking their money elsewhere. So in practice, a strong rule of law enables growth by lowering uncertainty and transaction costs, while a weak rule of law would deter growth by raising risks, costs, and discouraging long-term investment. Let me give a concrete example of my own experience.

In the year 2000, while I served as Attorney General of Lagos State and the current Attorney General was also there serving with me, the Governor, Bola Tinubu, now President Bola Tinubu, forwarded a report to me about a troubling trend. It showed that Lagos State’s stock of low and middle-income rental housing was not growing. In other words, people who used to build and who were expected to build middle-to-low income housing were no longer building.

They preferred to invest in stocks and bonds rather than building houses for rent. The report explained why, it said many landlords simply lost confidence in the courts.

The magistrate court process was painfully slow; tenants would often pay for a couple of years, two years’ rent in advance, and then stop paying, betting that if the landlord sued, the case would drag on for years while the tenants stayed rent-free. So building rental housing was no longer as attractive as it was.

I mean, there were days in the past when people would say my retirement is to build four flats and rely on the income from my four flats that I’ve built, but that was no longer the case. So the lesson was clear, and we decided that we had to take action. We reviewed thousands of pending landlord and tenant cases and confirmed that the rampant delays were just a problem.

So we set up mediation centers as part of the Lagos State Justice Citizens’ Rights Project, and these centers provided accessible mediation services, especially for small claims. We enlisted trained volunteer mediators, most of them lawyers in the Ministry of Justice, or we later on engaged other people to help parties negotiate and to also help them to just resolve a lot of these landlord and tenant cases. As a matter of fact, as soon as the mediation centers were set up, landlord and tenant cases were practically all that they handled.

So what would happen typically is that a landlord and tenant would meet with a mediator to reach a binding settlement agreement, and the results were quite remarkable. In one year, the mediation centers resolved over 8,000 landlord and tenant cases, whereas the magistrate court had completed only 2,000 within the same period. Today, the Lagos State Government has, I think, about 18 or so mediation centers, if not more, and resolves over 20,000 cases each year, most of them landlord and tenant disputes.

So by reducing delay and increasing certainty, the initiative restored some confidence in housing investment and unlocked thousands of rental homes. Of course, in a place like Lagos, the problem is enormous and continues to be enormous. But I think the moral of the story is that if you have delays in the courts, you can have other problems associated with the development of the economy of the state or the nation.

But the problem of delays in our court system is even deeper and much more pervasive. The Justice Research Institute very recently concluded a report on the question of the time it takes to resolve commercial cases in our courts, and that report was just completed in August of this year and the findings are staggering. One, it says, on average, a commercial case sits in the High Court for between four years and two months. If appealed, it will spend another three years and four months in the Court of Appeal, and if it goes on to the Supreme Court, it will take another six years and six months more to conclude. Now, that is when you get a date to be heard. Altogether, a commercial dispute can take nearly 13 years from filing to final Supreme Court judgment.

Now, these are just averages. Many cases take even longer. I’m sure that almost every practicing lawyer here knows of a case, even if you are not even a lawyer, know of a case that has gone on for much longer than the averages that I’ve just spoken about, and that has happened all the way to the Supreme Court.

I’ve had an appeal since 2012, and I don’t even have a date yet for that appeal, although I will spare myself the trouble of even going to go and argue the case. I have my learned friend, Babalaki SAN, who is here. Anyway, such delays are disastrous for business and investment, as you know.

Delays in commercial trials are particularly disastrous, and the UK Court of Appeal had occasion to talk about delays in Nigerian courts in the case of IPCO and NNPC. That’s a 2015 case. This was a challenge to the enforcement of the Nigerian Seated Arbitration Tribunal Award, which came before the English Court of Appeal.

The court referred to the delays in the parallel proceedings, which were going on before a Nigerian court, as catastrophic, and I’m quoting the court. And the court said that it could take a further 30 years to resolve the case that was going on in Nigeria. Incidentally, the expert witness who testified on behalf of IPCO on delays in Nigerian courts was a former Chief Justice of Nigeria, who testified that it could take between 20 to 30 years to resolve a case in a Nigerian court.

The court, as you know, is a taxpayer-funded public resource. The wasting or abuse of the finite time of the court, without strict consequence, will eventually discredit the system, and it is doing so incrementally, and affect the decisions of those who want to invest. So whether or not it’s even worth their while, especially if a dispute emerges.

So addressing delays must involve imposing sanctions by a more intentional regime of award of adverse and wasted costs. So I think that costs, especially for dilatory tactics coming from lawyers, costs will be very important. Adverse costs are paid, of course, as you know, to the successful party in a civil case, and wasted costs are directed against legal practitioners for poor professional standards in the conduct of a case.

So severe costs should attend adjournments, and there is no greater waste of taxpayers’ funds than for a scheduled case to have to be adjourned. I recall many years ago, while I was serving as advisor to the then Federal Attorney General, Nigeria had a case before the courts, the Royal Courts of Justice in England, and the British Council was already there, was a case involving NEPA at the time. And the officials who were supposed to come to court that morning, but we had arrived the day before.

The court was supposed to be on a particular day at nine o’clock in the morning. Some of us had arrived the day before. The officials who were supposed to be there didn’t show up until that morning.

So they arrived first thing in the morning, I think it was at Gatwick Airport in those days, and they came to court, but we were sitting down there at nine o’clock. Nobody, I mean, of course, all the other side was there waiting. Our own people hadn’t shown up.

So the court then decided at that point that it was going, that it had to adjourn, it’s about 15 minutes or so after, and said, well, our case would await another date. But then the court fined the government. The fine was so huge that, in fact, we almost froze right where we were.

I think it was something in the order of about 200,000 pounds or so for just being late. But that way, you discourage people from just taking advantage of the system and delaying cases. So it’s only heavy costs, in my own opinion, that will discourage malfeasance.

Then there are also other reforms that we can implement. We can have specialized commercial courts, and Lagos State Government has now established a commercial bench, which I am sure will certainly move cases on much faster. We must digitize actively our court processes; e-filing, digital dockets can speed up processes, and it’s no longer rocket science.

Everyone else everywhere else is doing all these things. So the increasingly corrupt processes for even getting dates, and you know that the process of getting dates now in many of our courts is becoming quite difficult. So that process too is being corrupted.

And that can easily be resolved by open and transparent digital processes that litigants and lawyers can even have on their phones, on their devices, and that’s taking place in other countries, even other African countries, to check the process of their cases, on data location, if they’re on the queue for data location. So with various tools now, and there are so many tools, simultaneous recording of proceedings and production of a transcript is far easier, and the records are certainly much more accurate. And I’m sure that all of us know that with the developments in AI now, even judgments of our courts will probably be written by AI.

So we’re getting to a point where the honest truth is that very, very soon, ChatGPT will write a lot of the judgments, very simply, and give the court even options as to, well, if you want to decide this way, this is how to support it, that way. I mean, you know that that’s already happening. And I trust in another year, I won’t be surprised if that’s how cases will be coming to our courts, which again, might at least lead to more just conclusions, because you also, as counsel, can do exactly the same thing, do the same process, know what the likely outcomes are likely to be and all that.

So, but the IPCO case, this case that I had cited, the UK case, points to even a more serious problem. And this is the interference of courts in the arbitration process, in arbitration matters, where the courts interfere. So arbitration is an alternative dispute resolution mechanism which would ordinarily provide an escape from the delays that we have in our commercial court system.

But often, the courts intervene on various grounds. For example, they may intervene on the basis of jurisdiction or arbitrability; there are all sorts of grounds. Now that can lead to a situation where the arbitration award, or even the entire process itself, is annulled, or parts of the award are annulled.

Now, this is a major source of interference. The Court of Appeal, I think, in 2021, in Yatirim and Sahelian Energy, set aside a foreign-seated ICC award. The seat of arbitration was in Geneva on the grounds that enforcement in Nigeria would be contrary to public policy, because the underlying contract, which was a cooperation framework agreement, was required under Nigerian law to be registered with NOTAP, the National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion.

And it had not been so requested, it had not been so registered. So for non-registration in NOTAP, the court said that that would be, if you enforce the award, it would be contrary to national policy and our interests. So it held that a Nigerian court has jurisdiction to set aside a foreign-seated arbitral award when Nigeria is the jurisdiction of enforcement.

Now, that’s a very dangerous proposition. But the Court of Appeal, and another Court of Appeal, the first one was in Abuja, the other Court of Appeal in Oil and Industrial Services and Hempel Paints, declined jurisdiction to set aside a foreign-seated award. This particular award was in England, and it was in London.

It held that only the courts of the seat of arbitration have supervisory jurisdiction, that is, the part it set aside. Now, that, of course, obviously makes more sense. But the Supreme Court is yet to clarify the position, given the two conflicting approaches.

The Arbitration and Mediation Act now categorically states that a court has no jurisdiction to set aside a foreign-seated arbitration. But I think the crucial point is that we must, as a matter of legal policy, discourage even more intentionally the interference of courts with arbitration. Because the moment a court gets into arbitration, it means that the entire ADR method is drawn into the slow judicial process, and it completely loses its advantage as a quick method of dispute resolution.

So we mustn’t even allow a situation where courts interfere except in the most extreme and the most urgent cases. So, because the moment it does, you know, all hope is lost. The whole arbitration comes back to the slow system.

But enforcement of judgments, even after extensive litigation, presents yet another significant problem of its own: enforcing judgments. And that is so, whether it’s a local judgment or a foreign judgment that you want to enforce.

There are far too many bureaucratic inefficiencies, procedural complexities, the lack of cooperation sometimes from law enforcement agents, inadequate mechanisms for asset tracing, and often judgment creditors simply abandon enforcement because of the high cost and the low success rate of some of the post-judgment procedures. Identifying, you know, and seizing judgment assets is also a problem of its own. Now, government debts, of course, I’m sure that most practising lawyers here know, government debts are even more notoriously difficult to enforce.

I see Mr. Babalaki SAN, I see him nodding his head. He went all the way to the Supreme Court many times to enforce his own judgment debt. Notoriously difficult to enforce.

Section 84 of the Sheriff and Civil Processes Act, as you know, mandates that judgment creditors must obtain the consent of the Attorney General of the Federation or the State, as the case may be, before initiating garnished proceedings to enforce monetary judgments against the government or any of its agencies. Of course, that consent is unlikely to ever come. But I’m sure some of us are familiar with the dissenting judgment of Justice Ogun Omidjo when she declared that Section 84 is unconstitutional.

She argued that it violates Nigeria’s constitutional provisions on separation of powers and judicial authority, and all of that. The truth, anyway, is that the Supreme Court has affirmed time and again that the consent of the attorney general must be sought. And it has not modified that position in any real way.

So I think Justice Ogun Omidjo’s dissenting judgment was helpful because at least it pointed in the likelihood of a different direction one day. While I personally agree with the principle that enforcement of judgments against governments should not be subject to government veto exercised by the Attorney General, I’m sometimes in two minds about the way forward. Because I have witnessed several situations of collusion between private individuals who are purported judgment debtors and unscrupulous government officials who are denied to enforce bogus debts.

And very often this occurs because the government is not opposing or contesting the purported debts and cooperating actively to enforce the same debts. And these scandalous attempts to do this, for instance, in the Paris Club refund cases, and there are so many of those cases now, are one such example where this sort of thing took place. I had the unpleasant task of reviewing some of the Paris Club refund cases and concluded that it was a fraud.

Many of them were just frauds on the system and had the active collusion of public officials who would benefit from these. So, as I said, one is sometimes in two minds about whether you shouldn’t have a situation where there’s a review of it, but I mean, it certainly, in my view, is unconstitutional to have a situation where the judgment of a court is subject to a further process of approval by the Attorney General of the Federation or Attorney General of the State. One of the fallouts of the uncertainties in the ability of the civil justice system to deliver swift and certain redress in many civil cases, even in debt recovery matters, is the criminalization of civil matters.

So a breach of contract or a debt owed may very quickly become obtained by false pretences or fraud. So the objective of the complainant is to leverage the threat of detention in police custody or even criminal process to have the police and other law enforcement agents chase after a debt that is owed or even simply redress a breach of contract situation. So the thinning line, and I think the line between civil and criminal action, is becoming thinner and thinner.

And this is certainly a turnoff for local or foreign investors if you realize that, because of a breach of contract or debt that is owed, you can suddenly become a criminal and go through a criminal process, be detained for a while and possibly even locked up. We simply must draw clear lines, and I believe that both the executive and the judiciary and the private sector have roles to play here.

Let me now turn very quickly to the criminal justice system, which I think is an often overlooked barometer of governance. A robust criminal justice system is, in my view, the foundation of law and order and thus commerce and democracy. So when criminal justice breaks down, all these pillars of society are at risk.

And in Nigeria, sometimes we see symptoms of a breakdown of significant aspects of the criminal justice process. So, for example, out of the 200 million people who are in this country, only about 26,000 are convicted and serving sentences in prison.

While about 81,000 others are awaiting trial one way or the other. Now, by contrast, the United States, which has about 300 million people, has roughly 2 million people in incarceration, in prison. The United Kingdom, which has about 67 million people, has about 80,000 people who have been convicted and are in jail.

So four times more than we have who have been convicted and are in jail. So, of course, I mean, it means that we are either remarkably well-behaved people or there’s something wrong with the system. So many crimes, as you know, go unpunished or take years to resolve.

For ordinary citizens, it creates an environment of impunity. Small business owners, for instance, I was speaking to a group of small business owners in a town hall setting where they had, you know, been talking about the various issues and complaints that they had. And one of the complaints that kept repeating itself was that many were not willing to open new branches where they couldn’t personally supervise operations because it wasn’t worth their while. Why? Because of the rampant theft and shoplifters, who knew even if they were caught, they were unlikely to be punished. The cost of doing business and living securely rises for everyone and not just for investors. Commerce is disrupted, and investments decline.

The consequence for criminal conduct is important to create an environment that encourages businesses to take greater risks, to expand and to settle into a better routine where you’re almost certain that the only thing to worry about is growing your inventory and attracting customers.

Another fundamental element of the rule of law is consistency and predictability in judicial decisions. Businesses need to plan for the future. And for that, they need to know the rules.

They simply need to know what the rules are. And sometimes, we find that even lawyers cannot say with confidence what the law on particular points is. They cannot say to you, I am sure that this is the position of the law.

The jurisdiction of the Federal High Court, for example, and many of us are familiar with this, Section 251 of the Constitution gives the Federal High Court exclusive jurisdiction over cases involving the Federal Government and its agencies. Now, that sounds pretty straightforward. But the Supreme Court in its several decisions has sometimes been inconsistent and contradictory.

One line of cases, beginning with the famous Nepa and Edegbero in 2002, going to other cases, you know, Oloruntoba Oju, there was Amosun,  so many of these cases essentially say that the mere presence of the federal agency as a party gives the Federal High Court exclusive jurisdiction, regardless of the subject matter. Then there’s another line of cases, starting with Onuora, you know, in 2005, and recently reaffirmed in Attorney General of Lagos State and National Sports Lottery, which holds that two conditions must be met; first, a federal party must be involved, a federal government or an agency. Second, the subject matter must fall within the Federal High Court’s constitutional jurisdiction as stated in 251. But then there are more head-spinning controversies as to when the Federal High Court has jurisdiction in contracts.

The distinction between simple and technical contracts can get very blurry. And if you look at some of the cases, you’re not even sure what’s going on.

I think it was in April 2025 that the Court of Appeal, in a case called CBN and Adani Mega Systems, upheld the Federal High Court’s jurisdiction in what would appear to be a simple contract because the contract implemented pre-shipment inspection statutes, which themselves, according to the Court, channel proceedings to the Federal High Court.

Now, this is a, you know, a narrow situation. In other words, the Court was saying that when the contract is in furtherance of a statute, and that statute confers the Federal High Court with jurisdiction, then it’s a matter within the jurisdiction of the Federal High Court. But the Supreme Court is yet to endorse this new categorization.

But the point, anyway, is that there is a real problem where you have these, you know, almost these problems are just moth one after the other. I think that after more than 20 years of these conflicting approaches, lawyers still cannot predict the outcome of this question with confidence. And this kind of uncertainty is, in my view, the antithesis of a mature rule of law environment.

I think the Supreme Court can, in one case, simply face all the controversies head-on and lay down the applicable principles in every situation. And if it does, and it is possible, it can take all of these cases, review all of these cases, as it has done, and it has done so commendably in some of the cases, even if you don’t agree with the outcome, but at least you know that the effort has been made to outline all these problems in one case. Just take one case, outline all the problems, and then tell us what the position is.

So once they’re able to do so, of course, it makes it much easier for everyone. Again, in the area of regulation and regulatory enforcement, there is a nagging problem of inconsistent regulation and weak enforcement. In key sectors, different levels of government have conflicting rules and apply them unequally.

So this creates uncertainty, and it encourages corruption. For example, in the oil sector, environmental protection in the oil sector, for instance, you have overlapping federal and state environmental rules. Slow enforcement, heavy reliance on companies’ self-reporting processes, have allowed many of the major oil firms to delay cleanup and avoid penalties.

Communities, of course, are left exposed, and tensions rise. To fix this, we need clear and unified rules. Digital filing systems, for example, a single point of regulatory contact and strong independent regulators with third-party audits to rebuild trust and ensure accountability.

And what happens in the environmental sector and in the oil sector, for instance, is it repeats itself in several different ways.

How about land and property insecurity? I doubt whether there’s anyone who hasn’t had to deal with problems associated with the uncertainty of title and the rampant use of self-help and even violence to enforce property rights. This, of course, reduces access to credit and discourages long-term investment. Land use reform in Lagos State has been a long-running engagement, and understandably so. This is Africa’s fifth-largest economy and everything is about the title to land. So we need to do all the hard work of advancing digitization of land records and firmly establish a complete statewide digital land registry with searchable titles and parcel maps. This is now even more doable with digital technology and AI.

We must also provide a lease pendants registry which is linked to the digital land system. I’m aware that the Lagos State Attorney General’s Office is working on a lease pendants registry currently, and that’s so important. We need to have a registry where you can go to and find out whether the land you are bound to buy is in dispute in a court of law.

It should be a straightforward thing so that you can then decide whether to take the risk or not to take the risk. But there should be a registry somewhere that is able to tell us, and I’m so happy that the Lagos State Government is already working on that, the Attorney General’s Office. Also, perhaps it’s time to simplify and unify title issuance processes, create a single window that, you know, the issuance workflow that harmonizes both federal and state and local requirements and accepts certified electronic documents.

And this is the perfect time. I must say that we’re in the perfect time. The president used to be the governor of Lagos State. Lagos State has most of the disputes. To align the various federal and state controversies and problems, this is the time to do so, including local, so that we can actually have a registry that is able to, a one-stop regulatory place here, perhaps in Lagos or in Abuja, where we can resolve many of these disputes. And it’s necessary to do so because Lagos stands out. This is where most of the commerce in this country and most of the business in this country takes place.

There’s also an interesting model that I’ve seen work in Rwanda. And it’s the requirement that they have, where you have large land transactions. So they require independent cadastral surveys and third-party verification for major land transfers. And where you have mortgage-backed lending, where it is substantial, that is always required. So the way it works is that the government will appoint accredited private surveyors, including NGO monitors.

And then there are community validation sessions to produce verified parcel maps that are cross-checked against all the administrative records. And then it is advertised, it’s publicly posted. This process would obviously deter corrupt conveyancing, protect buyers from disputed land, enable mortgage finance by giving lenders a bit more confidence, and generate very high-quality spatial data for planning and revenue collection.

Then there’s the issue of consistency in the application of government policy and rules. Consistency in the application of rules, government policy, and all that. Study after study has shown that where you have policy reversals, it generally hampers investment, both local and FDI.

Succeeding administrations, generally speaking, tend to abandon or reverse the policies of their predecessors. Banning and unbanning of agricultural products, for example, sudden changes in licensing fees and spectrum allocation rules for those in the communication space. Telecom operators and tech startups have faced regulatory uncertainty, affecting, of course, their expansion plans.

But what can be done? What can we do about that? A few suggestions. I think there should be institutional reforms to ensure policy continuity. And we simply must be intentional about this.

How can we reform our institutions to ensure that, as much as possible, there is policy continuity? There should be stakeholder consultations before major policy shifts. And we can do this by law, we can also create a national investment charter, and we can get cross-party support for that sort of thing, making it more difficult for the government to arbitrarily abandon what its predecessors have done. Also, we can be creative about legal safeguards and devices to protect long-term investments from abrupt reversals.

Nigeria has had some experience with local safeguards. Some of us will remember the Oso Condensate Project. There was an act in 1990 to back that major project at the time.

So that special law empowered the NNPC to borrow in any currency to guarantee loans for the Oso field development. And it even stated that its provisions would override any conflicting laws. These assurances, which were provided in that law, because some would refer to it as an Oso-specific law, these assurances eliminated bureaucratic hurdles and gave Mobil and its partners the confidence to proceed, confidence to invest, because they were, of course, afraid that given the sheer size of the investment, they couldn’t take a policy reversal.

So they insisted on an Oso-specific legislation, which in the schedule included the agreements that they had reached with the government. The success of that particular project and the law has given confidence to the government and its partners to use similar project-specific frameworks. And some have been used, of course, as you know, with Shell, with Chevron, with Total, and others.

Also, I think, as I had said in my earlier comments, the duty of the state to provide for the welfare and security of the citizens is a fundamental imperative of state power. Whether we accept the position or not, it is clear that the business of government, the fundamental business of government is the security and welfare of the people. Our constitution provides socioeconomic rights on education, on healthcare, on housing, employment, social welfare, et cetera.

Although, of course, these are not justiciable rights, but those provisions remind us that development must reach the poor and the marginalized. And these rights, as we know, are not necessarily directly enforceable by our courts, but they should shape our priorities, especially in a country where the majority of people still live in conditions of poverty or informality. We cannot rely on a trickle-down approach, where we expect that if industry prospers, if commerce prospers, then people will prosper.

The bottom of the pyramid is too large for us to ignore the fact that we need people-centred governance policies that place the needs of the ordinary citizens, especially the young people, at the core. Africa and, of course, Nigeria have the youngest population in the world. Nearly 70% of us are under 25.

And the failure to address these needs, of course, will threaten security, which, of course, means it will threaten economic development. By putting ordinary people first, by expanding opportunity at the bottom of the pyramid, we can make our society more stable and growth more sustainable. This is not only, in my view, a moral path, but I think it’s a diplomatic path if we expect sustained economic development.

So let me conclude by saying that I think it is fairly clear that the problems are generally not problems of a lack of policy or laws, there are more problems of weak institutions, weak execution of policies and rules, and more human-type problems. We must reduce human discretion in the operations of our regulatory agencies.

There’s also a need to rethink our approach to reform. There must be a meeting of the minds between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. And I speak about a practical sit-down meeting.

Strangely, that doesn’t necessarily happen often, but there’s a need for there to be a sit-down, a meeting, and also eventually with the private sector to determine what and what needs to be done, because every problem is human. Each of these sectors must see the failings and how one failing somewhere affects the others. So they must then decide to collaborate intentionally in order to deliver economic development.

These are human problems, and they’re not insurmountable. All I think we need is the will to do so. And trust me, it is we who are going to have to solve these problems, not spirits from somewhere.

Thank you all very much.