Post-civil-war Nigeria caught the 1973 OPEC oil-price spike at full force. Crude jumped from roughly $3/barrel in 1972 to $11.65/barrel by January 1974 — a near-quadrupling that turned Yakubu Gowon's reconstruction budget from a stretch into an embarrassment of riches. Gowon's quote that Nigeria's problem was 'not money, but how to spend it' became the era's epitaph.
The Indigenisation Decrees (the Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decree of 1972, revised 1977) transferred whole tiers of the economy — banking, insurance, manufacturing, distribution — to Nigerian ownership, creating a new urban business class but also entrenching the federal centre as the gatekeeper to wealth. The Udoji Salary Review of 1974 awarded public servants nine months of arrears in a single lump sum; the resulting demand shock fed inflation that ran into double digits by 1975.
The Second (1970–74) and Third (1975–80) National Development Plans channelled oil rents into universities (the 'Second Generation' of federal universities — Calabar, Jos, Ilorin, Maiduguri, Kano, Port Harcourt, Sokoto), the Lagos Metroline that was never built, the still-standing National Theatre, the Ajaokuta Steel project, the Kainji and Jebba dams, and the universal-primary-education rollout of 1976.
FESTAC '77 — the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, January–February 1977 — was the era's signature spectacle: 17,000 performers from 56 countries; the purpose-built FESTAC Town in Lagos; the missing FESTAC Mask loan refusal from the British Museum. Lagos, Port Harcourt and Warri tripled in population. Smuggled rice, Nigerian fried rice, Peugeot 504 saloons, and the first Nigerian-assembled Volkswagen Beetles all date to this decade.
The political shadow was just as long. The Murtala/Obasanjo transition produced the 1979 Constitution and the Second Republic, but it also bequeathed Shehu Shagari a balance-of-payments crisis: by 1978 Nigeria was already taking the first 'Jumbo Loan' ($1bn from a syndicate of foreign banks) to plug the gap left when oil prices softened. The boom was over by 1981; the spending habits, the federal-revenue-allocation politics, and the import-dependent consumption it normalised would shape every fiscal crisis that followed — from SAP in 1986 to the fuel-subsidy reckonings of the 2010s.
Figure 1
OPEC basket price and Nigeria's oil revenue, 1970–1988
The 1973 quadrupling, the 1979 second spike, and the 1986 cliff that ended the boom in a single year.
Source: OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin 2024; CBN Annual Reports 1970–1988.