I am Igbo, and that identity changes the economic question I am prepared to ask about land. When modern economics encounters land, it usually knows what to do with it. Measure it. Survey it. Establish title. Determine its highest economic use. Estimate compensation. Calculate expected returns. Transform it into capital. When government encounters land required for a major development project, another vocabulary appears: acquisition, overriding public interest, infrastructure, investment, employment, industrialization, GDP, tax revenue, and national development. These are legitimate economic concepts, and I believe deeply in Africa’s industrialization. But there is a question that neither a corporate balance sheet nor a government development model can answer adequately: How much is the value of the priceless? For an Igbo person, this question becomes particularly profound because land can mean something fundamentally different from what conventional market valuation assumes. Àlà is not exhausted by the concept of real estate. Land can carry ancestry, lineage, memory, identity, moral obligation, spiritual meaning, inheritance, community, and the physical continuity between those living today, those who came before them, and those expected to come afterward. My father’s house may possess a market price, but asking me merely, “How much is your father’s house?” can misunderstand what is being valued. You are pricing the building while I may be thinking about my father. You are measuring the plot while I am thinking about my origin. You are calculating replacement cost while I am asking where my children will return to when they want to know where they came from. We are therefore not necessarily disagreeing about the price of the same thing. We may be describing two fundamentally different things.

This distinction provides the philosophical foundation for examining the enormous industrial transformation occurring around Ibeju-Lekki and the Dangote Petroleum Refinery. The refinery itself represents precisely the kind of productive African capacity that I ordinarily argue Africa must build. It is not a trivial commercial project. The refinery describes its site as approximately 2,635 hectares and its processing capacity as 650,000 barrels per day, while reporting tens of thousands of workers associated with the project. It represents industrialization, import substitution, infrastructure, investment, international trade, engineering capability, productive capital formation, and the possibility of retaining considerably more petroleum value within Africa. Those are achievements that should not be intellectually minimized simply because the project is being critically examined. Indeed, the strength of this argument depends upon acknowledging them. The difficult moral problem is not created when a worthless project displaces people. The difficult problem arises when something genuinely valuable is created by imposing losses whose value the project cannot adequately calculate.

This is why the debate cannot be reduced to Dangote versus development opponents. The deeper conflict is between competing theories of value. Corporate finance asks what capital invested in the refinery will produce. National economics asks what the refinery contributes to production, energy security, foreign exchange, employment, industrial capacity, exports, and GDP. Government asks what strategic benefits justify the allocation of land. A displaced community may ask something fundamentally different: what happened to the land from which we derived livelihood, memory, belonging, and continuity? A fisherman asks what happened to his fishing ground. A farmer asks what happened to agricultural land. A family asks what happened to its home. An indigenous philosophy may go further and ask what happened to the relationship between a people and the ground through which their existence was historically organized. The mistake occurs when the first set of questions is answered and society behaves as though the second has therefore also been answered.

Evidence from Ibeju-Lekki makes that problem more than theoretical. A peer-reviewed 2024 study of coastal fishing communities found substantial perceived effects from industrialization and changing land use. Ninety-five percent of fishers surveyed reported that their livelihoods and Sardinella maderensis fisheries were affected mainly by refinery development and other industrial land uses; the study describes encroachment, loss of fishing grounds, reclamation, pollution pressures, and wider industrial development as significant threats to small-scale fisheries. Reporting from affected communities has documented allegations of displacement, inadequate compensation, lost farmland and fishing access, and unfulfilled expectations, although company and government representatives have disputed aspects of these accounts and have pointed to compensation, excised community land, environmental studies, schools, training, and other community interventions. The IFC’s environmental and social documentation also shows that land acquisition and involuntary resettlement were sufficiently material issues to require formal community structures and compensation and resettlement processes. The responsible conclusion is therefore not to declare every allegation proved or to attribute every livelihood change exclusively to one project. It is to recognize that industrial transformation in Ibeju-Lekki has produced a real collision between large-scale capital development and pre-existing communities whose relationships with the land and coastal environment preceded the industrial complex.

My Igbo perspective gives me a philosophical language through which to interrogate that collision, even though Ibeju-Lekki is not Igbo land and its indigenous communities possess their own histories, identities, traditions, and understandings of land. I am not imposing Igbo cosmology upon them. I am using Igbo philosophy as the standpoint from which I challenge the assumption that the market’s conception of land is universal. Once one indigenous African philosophy demonstrates that land can belong simultaneously to economic, ancestral, moral, communal, and spiritual orders, the proposition that land is simply a commodity becomes intellectually unstable. Other communities must then be permitted to articulate their own meanings rather than having the market define those meanings for them.

Within Igbo thought, Àlà carries a depth that the English word “land” struggles to reproduce. Land is material because people farm it, build upon it, inherit it, and derive livelihood from it. But land also situates the person within a lineage and community. The dead do not simply disappear from the social imagination; ancestors and burial places connect family history to physical territory. A father’s compound therefore may contain an economic asset, but it can simultaneously constitute an archive. The walls may deteriorate. The roof may be replaced. The monetary value of the structure may rise or fall. Yet the significance of the location derives partly from the fact that this happened here. This is where the family lived. This is where the father stood. This is where generations gathered. This is where the dead were buried. This is the geographical answer to the question, Where do you come from?

That produces what I call the Value of the Priceless Problem. Market valuation assumes substitution. If a commercial vehicle is destroyed, another comparable vehicle can be purchased. If machinery is damaged, replacement cost can be estimated. If inventory is lost, its monetary value can generally be calculated. Compensation makes conceptual sense because money can obtain something performing substantially the same economic function. But the logic becomes unstable when applied to the non-substitutable. If ancestral land is taken and a family receives money sufficient to purchase another parcel twenty kilometers away, has the lost asset actually been replaced? Economically, perhaps some property value has been restored. Ontologically, something entirely different has happened. A new parcel can replace land area. It cannot become ancestral retrospectively.

This is why “fair compensation” can become an incomplete concept. Nigeria’s Land Use Act provides legal mechanisms for revocation and compensation, including compensation connected to unexhausted improvements. But legal compensation and complete restoration are not synonymous. The law can determine what interests the state recognizes, how acquisition occurs, what compensation categories apply, and how disputes should be addressed. It cannot, merely by assigning monetary value, establish that every dimension of the loss has been restored. Research on land acquisition associated with the broader Lekki Free Trade Zone demonstrates how significant this difference can become in practice. In one study of 140 affected households, 56 reported having been promised compensation, only one of those households reported an opportunity to negotiate it, only four said they had been told how the amount was calculated, and 38 of the full sample reported actually receiving compensation; among recipients, 97 percent believed it did not cover all their losses. These findings concern the broader land-expropriation process associated with the Lekki Free Trade Zone and should not simply be attributed wholesale to Dangote Refinery itself. But they demonstrate the underlying problem: the existence of a compensation mechanism does not establish that affected people regard themselves as having been made whole.

The Land Use Act consequently raises a question deeper than whether compensation procedures were technically followed in any particular transaction. It raises the philosophical question of who possesses authority to define what has been lost. Government can determine legal title. A surveyor can establish boundaries. A valuer can calculate improvements. A corporation can calculate project costs. An economist can estimate the social return from industrialization. A court can interpret statutory rights. But none of these exercises automatically captures the complete meaning of land to the people whose relationship with it is being terminated. The danger begins when legal power over land becomes mistaken for philosophical authority over the meaning of land.

I would therefore be careful with the claim that the Land Use Act is simply a “colonial relic.” The Act itself was enacted in 1978, almost eighteen years after Nigerian independence. The stronger critique is not historical labeling but institutional structure: whether a postcolonial legal regime reproduced or reinforced a conception of land administration that insufficiently accommodates indigenous relationships, communal tenure, ancestral attachment, and non-market value. That is a harder argument to dismiss because it does not depend upon rhetoric. The question becomes whether African independence adequately decolonized the theory of value underlying African land law.

This is where the concept of epistemic injustice becomes useful. Miranda Fricker developed the concept to describe forms of injustice affecting people specifically in their capacity as knowers. Applied cautiously to land, the framework raises a profound question: what happens when an indigenous community possesses a vocabulary of value that the dominant legal-economic system does not know how to hear? The community says ancestry; the valuation system hears acreage. The community says burial ground; the system asks replacement cost. The community says identity; the corporation records land acquisition. The community says livelihood; the development model records GDP. The community says, this cannot be replaced; the institution replies with a cheque. The injustice may therefore occur not only because the compensation is too small but because the system has recognized the wrong category of loss.

David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession supplies another critical lens, although it should not be converted into a conclusion before the evidence is established. Harvey’s broader argument examines processes through which assets, commons, resources, or rights can be transferred into new regimes of capital accumulation. Applied to major land-intensive industrial development, it forces an important distributional question: who gains an economically productive asset, and who bears the transition costs through which that asset becomes possible? A refinery may create billions in productive value while particular communities bear concentrated losses. Both propositions can be true simultaneously. Macroeconomic benefit does not automatically cancel microeconomic dispossession.

That is where conventional growth statistics become particularly inadequate. GDP can increase when a refinery produces more petroleum products. Corporate profits can rise. Exports can expand. Government can collect additional revenue. Investors can gain. The stock market can celebrate industrial performance. Nigeria can reduce dependence upon imported refined petroleum. All of these outcomes can represent genuine economic progress. Yet GDP does not subtract a father’s lost ancestral relationship because GDP has no account called ancestral continuity. A corporate balance sheet does not record the fisherman’s disappearing relationship with coastal waters as a corporate liability unless law or contract makes it one. A stock price does not automatically decline because an elderly person can no longer return to the landscape through which childhood, livelihood, and family history were organized. What cannot enter the accounting system can disappear while the accounting system reports growth.

This is the precise point where my philosophy of human development becomes decisive. Economic development exists for human development. Industrialization exists for human development. Infrastructure exists for human development. Investment management, international finance, and international trade ultimately derive their legitimacy from their contribution to human flourishing. Human beings do not exist so that GDP can grow. GDP is useful because economic production can improve human life. Capital is not the final purpose of society. Capital is an instrument through which society organizes productive activity to serve human needs. Once this hierarchy is reversed, development can begin sacrificing the human being to the economic indicator supposedly designed to measure human progress.

This does not mean Africa should reject industrialization. My own economic philosophy would make such a conclusion impossible. Africa urgently requires larger productive industries, infrastructure, manufacturing, energy systems, financial capacity, international trade, and domestic capital formation. The Dangote Refinery itself demonstrates the scale of African productive ambition I believe the continent requires. The question I am asking is therefore more demanding than a simple anti-capitalist critique: Can Africa industrialize without treating Africans as expendable inputs into industrialization?

If the answer is no, then our development model is intellectually impoverished.

The proper opposition is not culture versus industry, ancestors versus jobs, indigenous identity versus modernity, or tradition versus capital. Africa should be sophisticated enough to hold multiple forms of value simultaneously. A refinery has value. Energy security has value. Employment has value. Foreign-exchange savings have value. Industrial capability has value. Fishing livelihoods have value. Community continuity has value. Cultural heritage has value. Ancestral relationships have value. Human dignity has value. The existence of one does not erase the existence of another. Development becomes legitimate when institutions confront these values rather than allowing the most easily monetized value to automatically defeat everything that cannot be entered into a spreadsheet.

This creates a different understanding of compensation. Monetary compensation remains necessary because material losses are real. But where displacement affects livelihoods, community networks, cultural heritage, sacred spaces, burial grounds, or ancestral continuity, compensation cannot intelligently end with a property valuation. Restoration may require livelihood reconstruction, resettlement designed with communities rather than merely for them, preservation or relocation of culturally significant sites where appropriate and acceptable, continued access to essential natural resources, benefit-sharing, long-term community participation, independent grievance mechanisms, and, above all, meaningful consent and consultation appropriate to the rights at stake. Money may participate in remedy without pretending to constitute the entire remedy.

My Economic Journey of Money framework adds another dimension. A mega-project is normally justified partly because it lengthens productive economic activity. Capital moves into construction, engineering, logistics, employment, refining, distribution, exports, finance, and supporting industries. That is desirable. But development accounting should also ask what productive journeys were shortened or destroyed in constructing the new one. If fishing communities lose access to productive waters, if farmers lose agricultural land, if local businesses lose the social ecosystems supporting them, then one economic journey may be lengthened while another is terminated. Development cannot simply count the new productive activity and assign zero to the displaced productive system because the latter was smaller, informal, indigenous, or poorly measured.

The same principle applies to my Africa Labour Economy and Labour-Centric Society frameworks. If development is ultimately measured by what productive labour can command, then affected workers cannot become invisible simply because their labor does not occur inside a formal corporation. The fisherman is labor. The farmer is labor. The market woman is labor. The boat operator is labor. Their productive activities may not generate corporate annual reports, but they generate food, income, household security, local trade, knowledge, and social reproduction. Industrialization that creates formal employment while destroying informal livelihoods must account for both sides before declaring the employment equation solved. The 2024 fisheries research from Ibeju-Lekki is therefore economically important precisely because it documents how industrial land-use transformation intersects with an existing productive economy.

My Capital Preservation and Progression framework must likewise extend beyond corporate capital. A family’s land can be capital. Fishing knowledge can be human capital. Community networks can be social capital. An ancestral compound can simultaneously constitute property capital and cultural inheritance. If development preserves corporate capital while destroying household and community capital without adequate restoration, then what appears nationally as capital progression may locally become capital destruction. Africa’s development accounting must become sophisticated enough to see both.

There is, however, a limit beyond which even the language of capital becomes inappropriate. Calling ancestral identity “cultural capital” can help economists recognize that it has value, but it can also accidentally repeat the original mistake by forcing everything into economic terminology. Some things matter not because they produce future cash flows, increase productivity, or generate measurable welfare. They matter because human beings have decided that they should not be exchangeable. The grave of one’s father does not require a positive net present value to deserve respect. A sacred place does not have to generate tourism income to possess significance. The priceless does not need to prove its profitability before it is permitted to exist.

This is where the market reaches its philosophical boundary.

The market asks, How much?

The priceless asks, Compared with what?

If there is no equivalent substitute, then the question “How much?” has reached the limit of its intellectual usefulness.

That does not mean every community can invoke pricelessness to prevent every road, railway, hospital, factory, port, refinery, or public project. Societies contain competing rights and needs. Infrastructure can itself protect human dignity. Electricity can save lives. Industrialization can lift generations from poverty. Housing requires land. Transportation requires corridors. Public necessity sometimes requires compulsory acquisition. But the existence of legitimate competing needs strengthens the requirement for serious justification rather than eliminating it. The more irreversible and irreplaceable the loss, the heavier the burden should become to demonstrate necessity, proportionality, meaningful participation, consideration of alternatives, adequate material remedy, cultural protection, and long-term restoration.

This is why the Dangote Refinery should become more than a debate about whether one corporation is good or bad. It provides an opportunity to ask what kind of industrial civilization Africa intends to construct. We can build an industrial Africa that repeats a narrow theory of development in which whoever can demonstrate the largest measurable economic return acquires the strongest claim to land. Or we can construct an African development philosophy capable of combining productive ambition with indigenous theories of human worth.

My position is the latter.

Africa must industrialize. Nigeria must build. Capital must be accumulated. Infrastructure must expand. International investment must grow. African corporations must become globally competitive. But economic development cannot require Africans to become strangers to the very land development claims to improve. If a project creates extraordinary economic value while imposing irreversible losses upon particular communities, the greatness of the project increases rather than diminishes its responsibility to those communities. The more powerful the corporation, the less convincing it becomes to argue that properly respecting affected people was economically impossible.

And so I return to the question with which I began: How much is the value of the priceless?

There is no intellectually honest market price.

The priceless is not simply something extremely expensive. The priceless is something for which substitution is conceptually inadequate. A house can be reconstructed, but a father’s house cannot be reconstructed somewhere else and remain the same father’s house. Land can be purchased, but ancestry cannot. A community can be physically relocated, but history cannot simply be transported by truck. Compensation can replace measurable assets, but money cannot travel backward through time and create another origin.

This is why an Igbo philosophy of Àlà presents such a serious challenge to modern development economics. It reminds us that land can carry something capital cannot manufacture. It can carry the dead, the living, and the unborn in one continuous human geography. Whether another African community describes that relationship differently is for that community to say. The larger principle remains: the people who inherit a place must participate in defining what that place means before institutions can truthfully claim to have measured what its loss costs.

Nigeria cannot build a sustainable future by assuming that everything standing in the path of capital accumulation possesses a monetary equivalent. Neither should Nigeria reject productive transformation merely because the past has value. The more difficult task is to build a development philosophy capable of respecting both inheritance and transformation.

Because a refinery can be rebuilt.

A corporation can relocate.

Capital can be raised again.

Factories can be reconstructed.

But there are some things which, once destroyed, cannot be issued again, financed again, imported again, or manufactured again.

That is the value of the priceless.

References

The empirical discussion of fishing livelihoods and industrial land-use change in Ibeju-Lekki is supported by a 2024 peer-reviewed Sustainability study. The land-acquisition and compensation discussion draws on published research examining expropriated community farmland in the Lekki Free Trade Zone. Environmental and social documentation associated with Dangote Industries records formal processes concerning land acquisition, involuntary resettlement, community consultation, and compensation. Community allegations and the contrasting accounts of compensation and community interventions are documented in contemporaneous reporting. Dangote Petroleum Refinery’s own materials provide the project’s stated scale, employment, sustainability, and community-development claims.