UK Personal Statement for Nigerians (UCAS Undergrad + Postgrad)

The 2023 Naira redesign created queues at every Nigerian bank for six weeks. I spent that period interviewing 47 small business owners in Surulere for a research project for my school’s economics club. What I found surprised me: the policy’s impact had nothing to do with the policy itself, and everything to do with how trust between citizens and institutions had broken down. A vulcaniser told me he no longer trusted ‘their paper money.’ Studying these conversations alongside Daron Acemoglu’s work on extractive institutions made me realize economics, philosophy, and politics aren’t separate disciplines — they’re three windows looking at the same room. That is why I want to read PPE.

My interest in economics began with practical questions. When my father’s transport business lost ₦4 million in the 2020 fuel subsidy reform, I wanted to understand why the same policy that hurt our family was praised by international economists. Reading Sen’s Development as Freedom helped me see the gap between formal economics and lived experience. I have since worked through Mankiw and introductory Mas-Colell, attended the LSE Summer School in Microeconomic Theory, and produced an extended essay on monetary policy transmission that won the West African Economics Olympiad bronze medal.

Philosophy entered my thinking through G.A. Cohen’s YouTube lectures on Marxism. His refusal to choose between rigor and moral seriousness shapes how I now approach every economic question. Politics, for me, is where theory meets evidence — I ran my school’s debating society for two years, leading to a national silver medal.

Outside academics, I write a monthly Substack on Nigerian economic policy (1,400 subscribers) and tutor secondary school students in mathematics, having helped raise the WAEC pass rate at my centre from 38% to 71%.