Nigeria, Dec. 25 -- Policy failure does not persist for decades by accident. Disorder that endures is almost always serving someone's interest.

Nigeria's recurring inability to secure energy sovereignty, financial insulation, industrial depth, or policy autonomy is often explained as incompetence, corruption, or bad leadership. These explanations are comforting because they personalize the problem. They allow society to believe that a change of faces will produce a change of outcomes.

But structural failure survives leadership cycles. That is the clue.

What persists is not error, but incentive.

To understand why Nigeria repeatedly fails to sequence policy correctly, one must examine who benefits from the current arrangement, who loses...