Policing third-world countries through a system of lending: The socioeconomic and political implications for Nigeria

Abstract

One common economic phenomenon of third-world countries is the high tendency not to be able to financially sustain themselves. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (2022), a plethora of these countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Congo, Sierra Leone, and Equatorial Guinea, among others, tend to continually borrow funds from countries with developed economies and other global financial institutions. In other words, many African countries continue to depend on the Western powers for survival (Mhango, 2017). This has been a growing trend since many of the developing countries attained the status of political independence some four to six decades ago. There are realities around the core inability of the governments of developing countries to finance many state-owned projects, including recurrent expenditures. Since the genesis of Nigeria’s public debt in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the country has been through economic hardship with poverty and stagnation to show for the humongous loans taken year-in, year-out. Oftentimes, going by the Western powers’ analysis, fingers have been pointed at the country’s corrupt leadership, while feasible lessons from the soil have indicated colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism of Western domination. Isiani et al. (2021) maintained that the most pressing position has been Nigeria’s economic linkage with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other instrumentalities of external loans that have over the years enmeshed the country in deeper debts through their imposed conditionality, and in addition submitted the example that the Structural Adjustment Program of IMF loans in the 1990s cemented Nigeria’s economic doom until today.