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I was a guest of the Norwegian Ambassador to Nigeria, His Excellency Svein Baera, a few weeks ago. The semi-formal meeting held at the Embassy in Asokoro, Abuja, was at his instance. “Dear Dr Uche…Thank you for the interesting books you sent us. Now I have read through the chapter about Norway, and think it would be interesting to have a chat with you about your findings…,” he wrote. The new book, released in February 2026, is titled, Infinite Possibilities: How Visionary Nations Outpaced Others. It is divided into six chapters and is an empirical study of amazing transformations in the five iconic nations: China, Israel, The Netherlands, Norway, and South Korea. While each of the first five chapters dwells on one country after another, the sixth chapter provides a clear-cut roadmap to sub-Saharan Africa countries, especially Nigeria, and admonishes them to take the understudied nations as prototype, “lest they remain a sloth in a fast-paced global community.”
The Chapter Four of the book with the heading, ‘Norway: A Pacesetter in Planning for Future Generations’, is quite informative. The Kingdom of Norway, located in the western coast of the Scandinavian Peninsula, commands unique characteristics. Like other countries in the Nordic region of Europe, it is sparsely populated. It has the benefit of high levels of literacy, its people enjoy long life expectancies, and by the making of geography, the country is rich in fish resources.
Although limited by scarcity of fertile land, which is less than five percent of the entire land mass, Norway’s good supply of electricity from the country’s hydro-electric reservoirs gave impetus to her manufacturing base. Hence, apart from the business of fish exportation, Norwegians thrived in production of chemical products before the discovery of large deposits of oil and gas in the early 1970. And as naturally enterprising people, the locals took advantage of the post-WWII heavy dependence on shipping and ship-building businesses to establish shipyards in virtually all the villages and coastal communities. Notwithstanding, the big giants in ship-building enterprise from Japan and South Korea dominated the markets with their technological superiority, but the discovery of oil in commercial quantities became a turning point for Norway.
From the outset, Norwegian forebears were strategic thinkers. During the two World Wars, the country maintained a non-aligned stance. It did not however, escape the five-year occupation of Nazi Germany. Norway maintains a hereditary constitutional monarchy and perhaps, to avoid the trap of over-bloated government, the country, in 2009, moved from bicameral legislature to a unicameral one. In addition to its early development of the industrial sector, workers in the sector were involved in partisan politics.
The workers-led political party called the shots in the years between 1940s and early 1980s. “However, even when political power alternated between the labour force and the conservatives, the persistent character of the nation’s politics remained the pursuit and maintenance of an egalitarian society,” an excerpt from the book reads.
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Norway is a classic example of an oil-producing country that survived ‘resource curse’. The oil sector was carefully shielded from capture by international oil companies (IOCs). It was also completely de-politicized. Agreements with IOCs protected labour, environmental, and safety standards. For technology transfer, the state actors negotiated and intentionally inserted full involvement of indigenous oil firms in the upstream, downstream, and ancillary productions and sales, in the contracts and MOUs with IOCs. In fact, the ‘Ten Oil Commandments’ tied up every loose ends. There was no room for emergence of oil oligarchs and billionaires who would ordinarily privatize the wealth. This was confirmed to me by Ambassador Baera as he shed light on the success story of his country.
The successive leaders in Norway have been exceptionally future-oriented. In the first 25 years of the country’s independence, Government prioritized payment of sovereign debts, building of national infrastructure, and expansion of welfare and social services. By 1990, the legislature passed the enabling law for the establishment of Sovereign Wealth Fund known as Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) with funding from three principal sources. First, corporate income tax of about 75% from oil producers; second, the revenues accruing from licenses for offshore drilling, and third, the State’s dividends from shares in Equinor, the state-owned oil company. The difference here is that while other resource-rich countries spend directly from their oil earnings and discretionally deposit a fraction to their SWF, Norway, on other hand, keeps all oil revenues in GPFG domiciled offshore, and a meager percent is remitted to run government at home.
Interestingly, GPFG has investments scattered in 70 countries and 9,000 companies across the globe. Today, it maintains the highest SWF of over US$1.7 trillion in the world. Equinor also has subsidiaries in 30 countries across five continents that are repatriating billions of dollars profits annually to Norway. Hence, in her August 2014 article on ‘How Norway has avoided the ‘curse of oil’, Sarah Traeanor of BBC notes thus: “For while other countries have struck oil and then binged on the revenues, by contrast Norway is continuing to invest oil and gas money in a giant sovereign wealth fund.” For Professor Alexander Cappelen of NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Norway concentrated on investments before they could spend anything and that was why the country is not entrapped in the “pitfalls of vast wealth.”
From the foregoing, Nigeria has some things to learn from Norway. One, Norwegian leaders didn’t sign away the economic sovereignty of their people during deals with foreign investors. Two, the leaders had sustainable plans for the future generation. Three, even with their attainments and many firsts, they are not letting up on consolidation of prosperity. Four, the egalitarian character of Norway engenders social stability. Five, and as shared with the envoy, salmon farming industry in Norway which peaked in 2023 has produced more billionaires than the oil sector. This could be a result of weak regulation. The enduring lesson is that nations must foster strong regulatory systems to maximize the gains of resource endowments.
