Nigeria’s potential for greatness has been a major subject of discourse for too long. Poor leadership, corruption and planlessness are some of the factors that have prevented it from being in the league of developed economies. Deputy Political Editor, RAYMOND MORDI examines how the country has fared and what can be done to chart a new course
More than six decades after independence, Nigeria is lagging behind many of its contemporaries in Africa and beyond in terms of development. With its teeming population, abundant mineral resources and its leadership position in Africa, the country has the potential to be a great one. But, 63 years after, it has remained a consumer country because of lack of focus on industrial development.
Poor leadership, corruption and failure to plan are some of the reasons it has not lived up to expectations, compared to its peers as of independence in 1960.
For instance, it was the leadership factor that turned the situation around for countries such as Singapore and India. Their leaders articulated a national vision that was later imbibed by successive administrations, irrespective of political party affiliation.
With the current parlous state of the economy, experts say that Nigeria needs to realise its potential through credible leadership that can engender some significant and positive changes to move the country forward.
Anire Ojuyah, a businessman and commentator on national affairs believes that Nigeria needs a credible and patriotic leader that can draw up a 50-year plan to serve as a foundation for the country’s industrial take-off.
Ojuyah said: “Patriotic leadership is essential because it ensures stability and continuity in government policies. One of the biggest challenges in Africa is that policies and programmes often change with every new government that assumes power. This leads to lack of consistency and coordination and ultimately slows down progress. A long-term plan can provide direction, stability and focus for a country’s development.
“As a people, we must start by having sincere and inclusive stakeholders’ meetings or discussions across party lines, which must focus on what Nigeria means to us without invalidating anyone’s opinion.
Critical and sensitive issues such as religion, ethnicity, value alignment and so on will be raised and deliberated upon; these deliberations are integral to the survival of our country.
In addition, he called for an amendment of the 1999 Constitution “to articulate the identified internal and external factors responsible for the challenges facing our country.”
The Executive Director of the African Council for Cultural and Economic Renaissance (ACCER), a non-governmental organisation (NGO), Nosa Osaikhuiwu said the country has always had problems with the implementation of programmes and policies, even as he stated that there must be a change in Nigerians’ orientation to chart a new course for the country. He said there is a need to sensitise the citizens to important programmes and policies of the government such as development plans.
The advocate for cultural change also said development plans must be handled from a project management perspective.
He added: “This means that each development plan must be ‘projectised’ with a project manager and project monitoring team that will monitor the performance of the project from a performance perspective; considering the key matrix and milestones to ensure that they are met.”
Osaikhuiwu said there is a need for cultural change without which the country cannot make progress.
“The church and the mosque have great roles to play in transforming Nigeria; not to become a more religious society but to transform the country culturally with the right value system. There is dignity in labour; if you are paid one naira, then do the job for one naira. If you are paid N10, 000 for a job, ensure that you put in the effort that is worth that amount of money,” he said.
The country has had a relatively long experience in development planning dating back to the years before independence. These include the First National Development Plan, 1962 to 1968; the Second National Development Plan, 1970 to 1974; the Third National Development Plan, 1975 to 1980; and the Fourth National Development Plan, 1981 to 1985. Other major strategic initiatives are the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP); the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS); and the strategy for attaining the Millennium Development Goals.
But these were bedevilled by lack of stability and continuity in government policies, as the priority and focus changed with every new administration coming into power. Besides, the country has only executed short and medium-term plans, which were adjudged to have been poorly implemented.
Experts say development planning is necessary to fast-track economic growth and improve the standard of living of the people. This is so because development does not take place accidentally. As a result, it is usually designed to effect some permanent structural changes in the economy.
Such changes, it is said, are connected with the involvement of the government and the private sector in the economy. In the course of initiating a development plan, the government has to specify the way it wants the economy to develop in the future and then, during the phase of implementation, intervene to try to achieve those objectives.
Aside from the duration of previous development plans, why were they not as impactful as they were expected to be? A civil society activist and former lecturer at the Federal College of Education (FCE), Kano, Dr Naseer Kura Ja’afaru said though the drafters of previous plans did marvellous jobs, they were not impactful because the basic superstructure that was required to drive their realisation was lacking.
This could be attributed to the structure of the economy post-colonial leaders inherited at independence. It was not a fully developed economy in the sense that it was an appendage of the British colonial empire.
This is the phenomenon that the late Claude Ake, a Professor of Political Economy, described as “the disarticulation of African economies” in his famous book The Political Economy of Africa.
By contrasting the structures of African economies in their colonial and post-colonial phrases, Prof. Ake noted that there is an implicit assumption that the winning of political independence was a watershed in the history of Africa and that it was a change that could reasonably be expected to have had a major, if not decisive, impact on the future development of African economies.
He added: “This assumption is not unreasonable. The nationalist petit-bourgeoisie which fought for independence had insisted that political independence was the essential preliminary to a fundamental restructuring of the colonial economy, and many students of Africa seem to agree that the political hegemony of the colonisers was a critical factor in the underdevelopment of Africa’s social formations.
“After two of political independence in Africa (about six decades today) available evidence on the validity of this assumption is ambiguous. Revolutionary changes in the structure of African economies have not occurred, and even their growth rates have been less than satisfactory.”
More than six decades after independence, there has been no marked improvement in that regard; at least in Nigeria.
Prof. Ake stated: “The major reason for the meagre progress is that the drive for economic development in the post-colonial era has followed the line of least resistance, which is generally the least desirable from the point of view of social benefits, balanced development and the long-term maximisation of development.”
In other words, the country’s post-independence leaders lacked the political will to make far-reaching decisions that were in the overall interest of the country in the long run.
Dr Ja’afaru, who is also the Executive Director of Basic Rights Action, a human rights organisation said corruption within the political arena has contributed to hampering development plans and programmes.
He said: “Corruption has been a pervasive social phenomenon. The disheartening thing about the whole scenario is that the purported development plans are avenues for some greedy leaders to engage in corruption. This is caused primarily by the illicit misappropriation of privileges and opportunities in public and private sectors for personal aggrandisement by those in positions of authority. So, the involvement of leaders in massive corruption, both in military and civilian governments has been a stumbling block to the implementation of national development plans.”
The implementation of the national development plans was also negatively affected by political instability in the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s and the consequent discontinuity of such programmes and policies. The era was characterised by military coups and changes of governments. These were the periods when these national development plans were launched. The political atmosphere was unstable and successive administrations were not interested to continue or implement projects that were initiated by their predecessors.
Poor or inadequate feasibility studies in planning and lack of comprehensive statistics are also believed to be one of the factors that undermined the impact of the development plans.
Data gaps have continued to impact the country’s development and growth prospects. Across sectors, poor data collection and management have robbed the country of the benefits of its enormous resources. Due to the inadequacy of data, planning is often based on projection and speculation. For instance, Nigeria’s population data, which is probably the country’s most essential data, is still predicated on projections from the 2006 population census which stakeholders believe was fraught with controversy. There is no comprehensive data to get a clear picture of the situation in some important sectors such as health, business and employment. Many government-owned establishments do not know the exact number of their members of staff on their payroll. As a result, the issue of ghost workers is a common problem due to lack of data.
Dr Ja’afaru said the discovery and commercial exploitation of crude oil helped to transform the economy from an agriculture-based one to a rent-seeking one. At this, he added, the country lost its focus.
He said: “Almost overnight, there was so much money at the time that the then military Head of State, Gen. Yakubu Gowon (rtd) said the country’s problem is not lack of money but what to do with it. That was what led to policies such as the Jerome Udoji Award when the government embarked on a spending spree for the fun of it. That was what happened up to the mid-1970s.”
There is also the issue of lack of monitoring and evaluation, particularly in recent times. Contracts were awarded with little or no monitoring and evaluation to determine the level of project completion, success and the type of material that was used for carrying out the projects.
Dr Peter Ozo-Eson, an economist said this was not the case during the post-independence era. He said the method of national development plan during the post-independence era was more effective than the current ones, which are imposed on the country by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
He added that the government needs to strengthen the monitoring of projects.
His words: “I think we require a strong Ministry of National Planning to ensure that there is the capacity to monitor these projects and ensure that they are properly executed. Going forward, we must also ensure that the identification and selection of future projects are more rigorous and community-based so that people can own and identify what their priorities are. If we do that and the projects are properly costed and budgeted for, we can have the benefits of both methods.”
In a telephone chat, Dr Ozo-Eson, a former Chief Economist of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) said: “Just before independence and the first decade after it, we used to have development plans that were largely based on projects. If you pick up a development plan then, you will see a list of projects that were targeted to be executed. It was easy to do an evaluation then, to see which percentage of the project was executed and which were not.
“From the Babangida era, however, liberalism came into the economic agenda, and we began to see neo-liberal economic policies. We now have a situation where we moved away from project-based economic planning to strategic planning. What we have been having now is policy and strategic planning. This is fine because it presents a situation where the public and private sectors are expected to function.
“But, you require an efficient public sector execution machinery to be able to function well and be able to propel development. Based on the performance of the strategic planning method so far, I will call for the bringing back of the project-based approach into the system.
“The current plan, which was launched recently, recognises some of the weaknesses inherent in the current policy and strategic planning method and it attempts to bring on board some level of project planning, at least for the private sector component of the plan. But, even at that, the robustness of project identification and project defence has not been as rigorous as it used to be in the 1960s; maybe it is because we have abandoned it for several decades.
“I am not against strategic planning but the public sector component of it must be translated into executable projects and those projects must be identified, must be defended and properly cost; so that a monitoring and evaluation mechanism can be in place to follow those projects through. “For instance, we have seen money being pumped into revamping our refineries for years and nothing happened. But, if we had in the development plan that the Port Harcourt Refinery is going to be refurbished within a five-year development plan, people would follow it up and insist that this is a plan and must be executed. As it is now, the maintenance of the refineries is done at the whims of those in political and administrative positions and we are paying dearly for it as a nation.”
The economist said anyone who says that project-based planning was not impactful is being economical with the truth.
He said: “If you look at the major projects that we have today, they were products of the first, second and third development plans, which were product-based. This includes the Niger Bridge, the Port Harcourt Refinery and road projects across the country. All those were results of product-based planning. Anybody who looks back at the economic history of the ’60s and ’70s will discover that the project-based planning method delivered more than the strategic planning questions approach.”
Dr Ja’afaru said the Babangida military era was the last straw that broke the camel’s back, as far as the country’s efforts to use development plans to fast-track the industrialisation of the country is concerned. His words: “Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), which the Bretton Woods institutions enunciated, was the last straw that broke the camel’s back because it was the adoption of that policy that made the government to jettison the idea of the development plans. It resorted to ad hoc plans like Vision 2010, Vision 2020, NEEDs and other economic policies prescribed by the IMF and the World Bank that were not comprehensive enough to galvanise and move the economy forward. That was the end of the development of development plans independently drafted by the Nigerian government.”
Though the various development plans have their shortcomings, the country, however, achieved considerable success in some sectors with its project-based development plans between 1962 and 1986. The sectors include agriculture, transport and communications. Some of the major projects executed during the period include the Nigerian Security and Minting Plant, the Jebba Paper Mill, the Sugar Mill, the Niger Dam, the Niger Bridge (Onitsha), the Kainji Dam and the Port Harcourt Refinery. Some of the public corporations established at the time, as part of the implementation of the First National Development Plan, include the defunct Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN), the Nigerian Coal Corporation, the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC), and the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA).
By the early 1980s, the country was far more productive than it is today. For instance, it was a net exporter of refined petroleum products; today, it imports all its refined petroleum products. The manufacturing sector was contributing more to the economy in the area of the creation of employment opportunities, as well as growth in the gross domestic product (GDP). At the time, Nigerians rode on locally assembled cars, buses and trucks and trucks. For example, Peugeot cars were assembled in Kaduna, Volkswagen cars in Lagos, and Leyland and ANAMCO produced trucks and buses in Ibadan and Enugu respectively, while Steyr assembled the country’s agricultural tractors in Bauchi.
The locally assembled vehicles had a high percentage of local content. For instance, Vono in Lagos produced the vehicle’s seats; Exide in Ibadan produced the batteries; IsoGlass and TSG, both also in Ibadan, manufactured the windshields; while Ferrado, in Ibadan too, produced the brake pads and discs. Dunlop and Michelin produced the tyres in Lagos and Port Harcourt respectively. Besides, the textile industry was booming, while the footwear manufacturing industry also flourished with companies such as Bata and Lennards producing shoes for Nigerians.
