In 1971 Nigeria, by then the world's seventh-largest producer of petroleum, became a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) (Library of Congress country study; Wikipedia).
- Date
- 1971
- Status
- Historical
- Location
- Nigeria
In 1971 Nigeria, by then the world's seventh-largest producer of petroleum, became a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) (Library of Congress country study; Wikipedia). By the late 1960s oil had already replaced cocoa, groundnuts and palm produce as the country's largest earner of foreign exchange.
OPEC had been founded in Baghdad on 14 September 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, as a counterweight to the "Seven Sisters", the group of multinational companies that then dominated the world oil market (Wikipedia). Nigeria's oil industry had grown quickly since the first commercial discovery at Oloibiri in 1956 and the first exports in 1958, and by the late 1960s oil had become the country's biggest earner of foreign exchange (Library of Congress country study).
The rise in world oil prices in 1974 brought Nigeria a sudden flood of revenue, which the country study describes as "dynamic chaos": a boom in spending, industrialisation and infrastructure that lasted until the oil boom ended in mid-1981.
Membership tied Nigeria's economy to world oil prices. The country study describes how revenue rose by 350 per cent between 1973–74 and 1979, financing massive but poorly planned spending concentrated in the cities, and how the older exports, groundnuts, cotton, cocoa and palm produce, declined until they ceased to be important at all, leaving Nigeria's exports dominated by oil. In 1972 the government issued the first indigenisation decree, reserving some businesses for Nigerians, and in 1975 it bought 60 per cent of the equity in the marketing operations of the major oil companies (country study). In 1975 production fell sharply with a sudden drop in world demand, until OPEC intervened late in the year to raise prices. Nigeria remains a member of OPEC (Wikipedia).
- Nigeria: A Country Study — The Gowon Regime — Federal Research Division, Library of Congress · link
- Nigeria: A Country Study — The Second Republic, 1979-83 — Federal Research Division, Library of Congress · link
- OPEC — Wikipedia · link
- Nigeria: A Country Study — The Obasanjo Regime — Federal Research Division, Library of Congress · link
- Nigeria: A Country Study — Emergence of Nigerian Nationalism — Federal Research Division, Library of Congress · link
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Archive ID: EVT-NIGERIA-JOINS-OPEC · Last updated 3 October 2026.
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