Abortion Location Nigeria

Since independence, Nigeria and indeed Africa have experienced different forms of abortions in their quest to birth sustainable economic development.

This situation is further exacerbated by the absence of audacity to hurdle over the obstacles faced as a result of past endeavours to give birth to it and economic independence. Many African nations have tended to clutch on the straw of Gross Domestic Product figures and have taken it to mean economic development. The question then arises: What has stopped Nigeria and Africa from becoming economically developed in the last 60 years?

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Economic development entails much more than our economic growth – GDP per capita figure. It also includes actual improvement in infrastructure and living standards, the well-being and quality of life of our entire population. Nigeria has and continues to experience economic growth without economic development. To attain economic development, we must seek out what we have been doing wrong, in order to appreciate fully what we must do correctly now.

In the 1960s, there was a push towards manufacturing basic consumer goods in Nigeria. The country had followed Kwameh Nkrumah’s/Ghana’s lead and adopted the import substitution industrialisation strategy. This was an inward development policy that called for the replacing of imported basic consumer goods with home produced ones and continuing towards replacing complex imported manufactured goods with home manufactured ones. Nigeria and some other African nations rejected the notion that they had to import manufactured products according to their raw natural resourses exports.

However, at the time, the import substitution industrialisation strategy did not yield the intended results of eliminating economic dependence on the West and creating an internal consumer and capital goods industrial manufacturing base in Nigeria. This became the first experience in abortion.

In my view, this is because Nigeria was economically dependent on her former colonial master and the West for her technology, industries for consumer and capital goods, strategic management, marketing skills, and even finance. Consequently, the newly established import substituting industries were making very heavy demands on our foreign reserves. It is my view that a nation cannot use economic resources primarily from nations on which it is economically dependent to gain its economic independence and development. Furthermore, what I call an abortion of economic development occurred because Nigeria and much of Africa lacked the audacity to innovate a long term strategy to remove or reverse the reasons why the ISI was not working, instead it was eventually dropped as the strategy to achieve economic development.

Crude oil reserves in Nigeria and the subsequent oil boom in the 1970s helped in distorting the knowledge of what Nigeria’s future economic realities would be as a result of not ensuring that the ISI strategy worked in the long term.

Crude oil exports during the oil boom helped dampen the effects of the global recessions and the failed attempt at the ISI strategy. However, other African nations were feeling much more the effects of their failed attempts at implementing the ISI. Much of Africa was in economic crisis. Some African leaders knew the continent’s future was gloomy and they had to do something about it.

Not happy with the status quo of exporting raw materials and importing almost all consumer goods, it was clear to such African leaders that the solutions to their problems would not come from the international economic system. This led to the Monrovia Strategy for economic development which was formulated in 1979. In 1980, African leaders convened in Lagos to devise a plan for the implementation of this strategy, and the resultant plan became known as the Lagos Plan of Action. It called for, national self-reliance, accelerating internal autonomous processes of growth, diversifying of self-sustained development processes and the accelerating of the process of regional economic integration.

In my view, it sounded like a good plan, as it would have made Nigeria realise that the reasons for the ISI strategy failure just had to be tackled and overcome in order to achieve economic development in the long term.

However, the World Bank preferred another plan developed by it called the Accelerated Development in sub-Saharan Africa Action Plan. This plan was a sharp contrast to the Lagos Plan of Action. It stressed on Africa continuing the system of exports of unprocessed agro and raw materials. It blamed poor agricultural and raw material export performance for Africa’s poor overall economic performance at the time. It seemed to disagree with Africa’s push for self-reliance.

The Lagos Plan of Action was never implemented by Nigeria or Africa. With the encouragement of the World Bank, it was dropped in favour of the Accelerated Development in sub-Saharan Africa Action Plan. In my view, this was Nigeria’s second abortion of economic development. This abortion occurred because Nigeria lacked the audacity to show or convince any concerned that she should develop and implement internally developed strategies that she felt would achieve her sustainable economic development at her own pace, and in the long run such would be beneficial to its international partners.

The Accelerated Development in sub-Saharan Africa Action Plan led to the Structural Adjustment Programme, which was adopted by Nigeria in the mid 1980s. Nevertheless, it did not bring about the desired economic development for the country. Reforms and reviews to the SAP did little to change its ineffectiveness in delivering the expected results. Strikingly, economic policy and strategy in Nigeria have not resulted in the much desired and needed inclusive economic growth and development. The quality of life expressed in infrastructure, health and educational masses inclusive development in Nigeria speaks negative volumes about the action plan, SAP and most economic policies imposed on or adopted by Nigeria including programmes such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. Interestingly, 50 years after her first attempts at the ISI strategy, Nigeria is still dependent on external entities for her technology, industries, consumer and capital goods, management and financing of major development projects. The time has come for Nigeria to face her economic development problems with audacity, demanding veracity from herself as well as all concerned for her economic development. I do not see how any nation can achieve economic independence and development without its own technological base for its consumer and capital goods. Neither do I think it is possible for any nation to achieve the former and later when it imports everything from toothpicks to candles.

The time has come for Nigeria to start implementing a Neo-import substitution industrialisation strategy with a Neo – Lagos Plan of Action. This essentially is the same as the original ISI strategy, but adapted to the realities of Nigeria today and includes strategies that overcome the reasons for its implementation failure the first time. Let us not be fooled or distracted by the GDP growth figures in a system that benefits a few and leaves the nation’s youths with no sustainable jobs that enable them to participate and benefit from the global economy.