This is a second part of the Ventures Africa series marking Nigeria’s 54 years of independence, it points to the middle as the best path for the country to take as she seeks to solve her many challenges and to realise the wealth of potentials that she harbours.

Nigeria is on a cliff; she battles a cancerous extremist insurgency that is wrecking lives and livelihood in the north and whose mayhem affects all parts of the country. Her socio-political climate is also simmering with ethno-religious tensions stoked by the coming 2015 presidential elections. Her economic situation, bedevilled with high poverty and unemployment rates, lies in desperate need of a serious makeover. These challenges alongside many others threaten to push Nigeria off the cliff, those who think in the extreme say such a fall could see her crashing in disintegration.

But gaps away from the cliff on which Nigeria hangs is her socio-economic and political potentials; a massive human and natural resources that if maximised can propel the country to the economic top of the world, an exceedingly rich diversity of culture that if positively tapped would make it a model of peaceful and progressive cohabitation in the human race, and a reinvigorated African can-do spirit inherent in her people that they keep using to defy all odds and make progress. Nigeria is just a bridge away from harnessing these potentials, dependent only on her will to put up missing link in the middle.

Intensively pressed by her challenges, the country desperately needs to provide effective in-depth solutions especially to the security crises in the north. And as much as Nigeria’s security system needs a massive overhaul, finding a lasting solution to the restiveness in the north, and preventing future ones in other parts of the country, can only be truly achieved with unity and positive collaboration across her socio-political, ethno-religious and economic divides. Nigerian leaders in all strata have to be drivers of the campaign of compromise and moderation, where tolerance and peaceful dialogue become the only espoused means of conflict resolution.

The Boko Haram insurgency partly gained its bearing by exploiting the huge gaps of religious intolerance and economic inequality that has always existed in the north. The rising political tensions associated with the coming presidential elections are also fed by large gaps socio-cultural nay ethno-regional cohesion. Nigeria needs to plug these gaps, her leaders need to work to meet in the middle and not strive to stretch their extremes.

The middle is also Nigeria’s path to solving her economic challenges.

First it has to be admitted that the country has made significant strides in creating public-private partnerships that have boosted its economic growth making it among the fastest growing in the world. The rebased GDP that put Nigeria up as the largest African economy has also shown the abounding opportunities in the land and is a key attraction for the investors thronging to the country. The privatization of power is also another positive step by the Nigerian government; it has brought a clearly foreseen departure from the epileptic power supply that has long been one of the major bane of businesses. Nigeria’s indigenous private sector is also booming, its middle class is rapidly expanding, more industries are springing up and most importantly Agriculture is picking up.

But economic growth does not literally translate into economic development; of this, Nigeria is a victim. With economic inequality still alarmingly high, unemployment and poverty rates yet to impressively drop, and cost and standard of living well below satisfactory, a lot still needs to be done to salvage Nigeria’s economic situation.

Nigerian government has to ensure institutional economic responsibility, first by ridding itself of corrupt and unethical practices that continue to strangle its effectiveness and then by creating and actively pursuing economic policies that narrow the inequality gap. Economic authorities must make sure that the growth of the big private corporations – whose progress has been the most significant so far- equally translates into the lifting of majority of those living in poverty into a well catered for and progressive middle class. As the private sector continues to assume mounting influence in the economics of the country, Africapitalism in Nigeria must be saved from becoming synonymous with oligarchy.

Although Nigeria’s middle class has been noted as rapidly expanding, jumping six-fold to 23 million between 2000 and 2014, 86 percent of Nigerians still remain within the broadly “low income” band; so much still needs to be done. The National Auto policy is an example of the industrialization drive that the country requires to get its millions of young energised youths to work. As exampled by the developed world, successful and sustainable economies are built on a progressive middle class.

The Small and Medium Enterprises also require genuine attention and support especially in Nigeria where a majority of them struggle to succeed. Not only are SMEs crucial for reducing Nigeria’s unemployment rate, researches have shown that Nigeria’s economy could ride on the back of successful  medium enterprises to massive economic development. Enabling environment is what the Nigerian government owes these SMEs, from tending to much needed-infrastructures to improving the ease of doing business. More also needs to be done to increase the access to bank loans and special grants. The Small and Medium Enterprises are already obvious drivers of Nigeria’s expanding economy, investing more in them and ensuring that they progress better could be  Nigeria’s ticket to entering the league of the twenty largest economies.

Despite these many challenges in need of addressing and the chances yet to be fully exploited, there is a fully living hope that Nigeria can succeed, she has everything she needs to do that. As she searches on at 54, for how to sort herself out of her problems, and how to maximise her potentials, the middle is no doubt the best path to follow.