The rulers of Nigeria have a rather strange way of operating seemingly incompatible fiscal and political systems that make them look like the cruel tyrants running China with the rule of the thumb.
Politically, China is known as Stalin’s last stand as it defiantly sticks to the brutal one-party communist old guard dictatorship. China’s communist dictatorship is strangely combined with one of the world’s freest capitalist economic system.
The world’s second largest economy is a capitalist economy run by a tyrannical communist dictatorship that does not tolerate opposition but incongruously condones competition which is the economic equivalent of political opposition.
Right now it is easier to invest in communist China than in democratic Japan.
Nigeria on its part operates an odd combination of fiscal unitarism and political federalism. Nigeria is a federal republic. The federating units are so autonomous that some have brazenly adopted state religion in open defiance of the nation’s constitution. No one in the federal government has protested the brazen rebellion because the states are considered autonomous units capable of making laws for the peace of their citizens.
Ironically, Nigeria strangely practices fiscal unitarism. Its fiscal policy is dictated by the federal government which collects all the federation’s
revenue into an account and shares it among the federating units.
Prior to May, 1966 when Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi,…
