Your childhood is not an economic indicator

Children and parents can live in the same household and remember it very differently. Parents carry the mortgage or rent, school fees, food bills, job insecurity, fuel costs and the invisible stress of making the numbers work. Children experience the emotional atmosphere around them: the size of the house, whether cousins visited, whether there was food on the table, whether holidays felt exciting and whether the adults appeared calm.

Memory itself is also reconstructive. Psychological research has documented rosy retrospection: past experiences can later be remembered more positively than they were evaluated while they were happening. That does not make nostalgia fake. It means nostalgia is evidence about how a period is remembered, not a substitute for national statistics.

Personal memory answers “What happened to me?” National comparison asks “What happened to Nigeria?” They are related questions, but they are not the same question.

Then technology quietly rewrote everyday Nigeria

Try explaining 2026 Nigeria to somebody transported directly from 1996. A Nigerian can transfer money across the country in seconds, video-call relatives abroad, run a business through social media, order transport from a phone, stream Nollywood, receive international payments, study online and publish to a global audience without owning a printing press, television station or shop.

World Bank data sourced from the International Telecommunication Union put internet use at about 41% of Nigerians in 2024. In 1996, mass consumer internet access was barely part of Nigerian life.

Electricity is the perfect Nigerian paradox. World Bank historical data indicate access has risen substantially since the 1990s; by 2023 about 61% of Nigerians had access. Yet access is not reliability. Blackouts, self-generation and inadequate grid capacity remain major economic constraints.

Nigeria can connect millions more people to electricity and still have an electricity crisis. Progress is not the same thing as sufficiency.

The Nigeria people remember was ruled by Sani Abacha

Any serious comparison must remember what 1996 actually was. Nigeria was under the military government of General Sani Abacha. Constitutional government had been suspended. The regime ruled by decree, political opposition was constrained, and contemporary human-rights reporting documented arbitrary detention, harassment of journalists and democracy activists, extrajudicial killings and severe restrictions on citizens’ ability to change their government peacefully.

Nigeria has had continuous civilian constitutional government since 1999. That does not make its democracy healthy by default. Freedom House’s 2026 assessment classifies Nigeria as “Partly Free” at 44/100, citing problems including electoral irregularities, corruption, insecurity and abuses by security agencies.

But disappointment with today’s democracy should not morph into a fictional memory of 1996 as a democratic golden age. Nigerians today can organise political parties, vote in national elections, criticise presidents publicly and experience transfers of civilian power. In 1996, the head of state was not removable by voters.

Nigeria added more than 120 million people

Nigeria had about 113.8 million people in 1996. By 2025, it had around 237.5 million.

That is an increase of roughly 109%. Nigeria’s population more than doubled in less than three decades.

This may explain more about Nigeria’s strange mixture of progress and dysfunction than almost any other statistic.

• Build more universities — but also add millions more students.
• Connect millions more homes to electricity — but add more people than the system connects.
• Build roads — while adding more than 120 million potential road users.
• Train doctors — while dramatically increasing the population each doctor must serve.
• Create millions of jobs — while millions of young people enter the labour market every year.

The World Bank says roughly 3.5 million Nigerians now enter the labour force each year. Nigeria has therefore often improved in absolute terms without improving fast enough relative to the number of people requiring jobs, schools, roads, electricity, hospitals, policing and housing.

This is the distinction that solves much of the paradox: Nigeria has often progressed, but not at the speed demanded by Nigeria’s own demographic growth.

Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question

Nigerians live longer than they did in 1996. More babies survive infancy. Real economic output per person is higher. Digital technology has transformed communication, banking and commerce. Electricity reaches a larger share of the population. Nigeria is governed by elected civilians rather than a military ruler.

Yet poverty remains extraordinarily high. Household purchasing power has been battered. Infrastructure has not expanded rapidly enough to keep pace with a population that has more than doubled. And insecurity has made activities that should be mundane — travelling, farming, schooling — dangerous in parts of the country.

So Nigeria is not simply worse than it was 30 years ago. Nor is it remotely as successful as three decades of technological change, oil revenue, entrepreneurial talent and demographic potential should have allowed it to become.

The most revealing comparison is therefore not “Nigeria 2026 versus Nigeria 1996.” It is “Nigeria 2026 versus what Nigeria could plausibly have become with 30 years of better institutions, security, infrastructure and human-capital investment.”

Nigeria has progressed. The tragedy is how much further it could have travelled.