MINT
No, not the leaves or ice cream flavour, I’m referring to Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey.
In 2014, Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs made the term popular. Thirteen years earlier, he had coined BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) - a group of countries believed to be on route to becoming developed.
Nigeria always made an appearance in these classifications, including the “Next Eleven” (2005) - a group of countries seen to have a promising outlook for investment and future growth.
Everyone in academia and the investment space took these titles and the selected countries seriously. You would often find them singled out in economics textbooks.
The media was in on it too. I remember reading a CNN article in 2014, which predicted that Nigeria would be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
We were up there with Qatar and China, with an estimate to grow at 7% for
