Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the various oil booms from the 1970s to the new scramble for oil resources by International Oil Companies (IOCs), and posits there are no sustainable policies put in place the government to ensure other productive sectors were developed with resources from oil revenues.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argue that since the discovery of oil in commercial quantity in the late 1960s economic growth in Nigeria has been very erratic, driven particularly by volatility of oil revenues and the boom-bust economic cycle experience in the country is directly related to over- reliance on oil revenues. But much more important are poor governance, endemic corruption, and mismanagement of the revenues, and then examines the extent to which the rush for oil revenue and allocation in Nigeria have resulted in perpetual dependent on oil, and how gross mismanagement of the same hinders any meaningful socio-economic development.

In 2003, the federal government introduced socio-economic reform programme in key sectors of the economy - the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), a medium-term development strategy with long term policy foundation. Its objectives are mainly fourfold: poverty reduction; employment generation; wealth creation and value re-orientation. These reform policies yielded some results in the form of savings and huge foreign reserves and exiting the country from both the Paris and London Clubs debtors' lists. But the gains and progress of the reform programme are now on the verge of being jeopardized, due to the slowdown in the implementation and in some cases outright cancellation of these reform policies and government development projects and programmes since 2011 by the present government. I conclude that the expansion and then decline of such development policies and programmes are negatively impacting on socio-economic development and governance in Nigeria