A republic without shareholders Part II

On the morning of January 5, 1998, a television appeal went out across South Korea.

The Korean Broadcasting System, then the country’s most trusted institution after the family altar, asked its viewers to bring their gold to designated collection points. The country was bleeding.

The Asian Financial Crisis had drained foreign reserves to the bone, the won (the South Korean national currency) had collapsed to somewhere between 1,700 and 1,800 to the dollar, and an IMF bailout of unprecedented size sat on the national balance sheet like an inheritance of debt nobody had asked for.

The Gold-Collecting Campaign appeal was simple: bring what you have, we will sell it abroad and we will use the dollars to pay down what the country owes. That was the entire pitch. There was no enforcement mechanism, no tax incentive, no decree, no compulsion of any kind. There was only the request, and the trust that whatever was given would be used as promised.

What happened next is the part that should make every Nigerian policymaker put down their cup of tea: 3.5 million South Koreans queued. They brought wedding rings, the rings their parents had worn before them and the rings their children had been gifted at birth.

Olympic medallists brought their medals. Retired soldiers brought military insignias they had earned at battles their grandchildren had never heard of. A Catholic cardinal brought the gold cross that had been placed around his neck at his anointment, an object of personal sanctity, and dropped it into a collection bin without ceremony.

It would be easy, and wrong, to read this as a story about culture or patriotism. Cultures do not queue. People queue when they believe that the man at the counter is not pocketing what they hand over. The gold drive was the dividend on a long deposit of institutional trust.

Twenty-six years later, and over 11,500 kilometres south-west, vandals scaled twenty transmission towers along the Ahoada-Yenagoa 132 kV transmission line in Bayelsa State and tore them down leaving the entire communities without electricity for four months. Across the country in 2024, 128 transmission towers were destroyed. The repairs cost N8.8 billion, about $6.4 million at N1,375 per dollar, and repair crews required armed security escorts to access several affected sites, as the vandalism overlapped with active conflict zones in the North-East.

The incident is not new as legend has it that the heavy metal divider traversing the old Lagos-Ibadan expressway ended up melting into Owambe cooking pots and stirring spoons. Two scenes: a queue in Seoul that emptied jewellery boxes to save a treasury; a field in Bayelsa that emptied a power grid to settle a grievance. Both are rational responses to the level of trust available in their respective social contracts.

This article’s central argument is that the variable most consistently predicting whether redistribution reaches the household is not GDP, not resource endowment, not even the technical design of social programmes. It is the institutional capacity to deliver what was promised repeatedly, over a long enough horizon to be believed.

There is a Yoruba saying that captures this rather well: the same sun that melts wax hardens clay. Oil wealth, federal architecture, post-colonial wounds, and demographic pressure are the same sun shining on the MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) economies. What differs is the material the sun is falling on. Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey took the heat and built something solid.

Nigeria, on the same exposure, has seemingly been melting in slow motion.

Indonesia offers the most instructive case because the structural resemblance to Nigeria in 1998 was almost embarrassing: oil-dependent, federally organised across 38 archipelagic provinces, freshly emerged from 32 years of authoritarian corruption under Suharto, roughly 200 million people, and poverty spiking to 19.9% following the Asian Financial Crisis.

What changed after Reformasi was not the resource base but the plumbing. The impact of three institutions was notable.

Firstly, the Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK), founded in 2003, secured a 100% conviction rate in its first 86 cases against governors, ministers, parliamentarians, and senior bureaucrats without first negotiating with the police or the attorney general. Indonesia’s ranking on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index improved from 122nd in 2003 to 88th in 2015, a gain of 34 places in twelve years.

The 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), published in February 2026, however, shows Indonesia has since slipped to 109th, a ten-place decline from 99th in 2024, as concerns mount over weakening judicial independence and shrinking civil society space under President Prabowo Subianto. That reversal vindicates, rather than undermines, the article’s core argument: reform gains, once won, must be institutionally anchored or they unwind.

Secondly, PNPM Mandiri, the National Programme for Community Empowerment, reached more than 70,000 villages, disbursing $6.754 billion through community-level committees designed to bypass the middle layers of bureaucracy that had, for decades, captured development funds.

Thirdly, Program Keluarga Harapan reached 15 million households by 2018-2019, with a 2024 budget of about $3.1 billion, conditional on school attendance and health checkups. The combined result in Indonesia is that poverty fell from over 60% in the 1970s to 8.47% by March 2025, representing the country’s lowest recorded rate in two decades.

Mexico’s Oportunidades programme ran continuously from 1997 to 2019, reaching 6.8 million households and 26.6 million people at its peak, reducing poverty by an estimated 1.8% net of other factors, and the design proved sufficiently exportable that it was replicated in more than 52 countries, including Brazil’s Bolsa Família as well as programmes in the Philippines and Bangladesh.

Turkey, the awkward MINT case given the democratic concerns its AKP (Justice and Development Party) government has generated, expanded social security coverage from 69% of the population to 99.2% by 2018, raised social assistance spending from 0.3% of GDP in 2002 to 1.4% by 2014, and in the 2025 UNDP Human Development Report earned its highest-ever HDI ranking of 45th in the world on its Human Development Index (HDI), with a score of 0.853. Whatever one thinks of Turkey’s politics, Turkish citizens are, on the metrics that redistribution is supposed to move, demonstrably better off than they were when the AKP took office.