No natural resource is inherently valuable

In my home (Nigeria + Africa broadly), there’s a popular sentiment that natural resources — whether in the soil, plants, or minerals — are inherently valuable. This is fiction.

Take oil, for example. It existed for hundreds of millions of years, but until the mid — 19th century, it was useless. Only after refining techniques, drilling technologies, and decades of infrastructure development did oil become valuable. It wasn’t one discovery — it was the cumulative effort of countless people over time.

The same applies to silicon, abundant in sand. For millennia, it had no use. Only in the 20th century did scientists refine it for semiconductors. But even after this breakthrough, it took decades to reduce costs and scale production to make silicon transformative. The impact was gradual and required immense collaboration.

Natural resources are neutral, often more likely to be harmful than helpful, until human effort makes them useful. No society has ever succeeded simply by having abundant resources. Countries like Venezuela and Nigeria, rich in resources, have struggled, while resource — poor nations like South Korea and Singapore have thrived by investing in human capital.

The lesson is clear: progress comes from investing in people — the capacity to innovate, educate, and scale — not from the resources themselves. Human ingenuity is what transforms raw materials into value.