VISION 2020 AND NIGERIA'S ECONOMY, THE WAY FORWARDAuthor: McStanford Marcellinus Nwogu Posted to the web: 3/18/2009 11:52:41 AM

NIGERIA ’S ECONOMIC WAY FORWARD

 Any government that wants to excel and meet the needs of her citizens without strategic planning seems to be building a castle in the air. Modern day politics has far evolved from partisan politics to tackling issues on ground and if we in Nigeria allow ourselves to be left out in the wind of change, we would be like the proverbial 5 maidens that forgot to buy kerosene for their lantern awaiting their masterâ's arrival.

 

Project Planning takes short term, medium and long term dimensions, and what dimension a government should take at any point in time should be based on the issues facing the economic and social environment of such government.

At one time in 2008, when the economy of Nigeria seemed to be booming, the stock market, financial institutions and insurance companies were all reporting elephant profit maximization and investments of private individuals and firms were fast recouped in a little short time. Only few people like us envisaged the problems that were posing around by the sudden sky rocketing price of oil in the international market. Then the foreign investors who made up huge portion of the Nigerian stock market took their money to make quicker and huger profit from oil in the international market. HOW MANY NIGERIANS SAW IT COMING, even the ones in control of the NSE? Most of our reports

and forecast were based on speculation. It is pitiable that a country as big as ours has no solid data house that can allow statisticians and experts to come together to digest events that happened yesterday, the ones that are happening today, so as to be able to know what would be our fate tomorrow. Little wonder we have been the way we are. Little wonder it does not take us anything to build but takes us everything to maintain what we built.

 

The global meltdown has engulfed even the countries that we least expected and here we are running, beating about the bush talking about job creation and bailout for companies. The question is; should we have been affected in the first place, should the impact be up to what it is now and still going to be, if we had a proper strategic and economic planning? These questions would have easily been answered and the answer would have been NO.

When Peter Drucker was writing America on the economic problems they would face “blue collar jobsâ€, no one took� him serious.

The same problem has gone beyond what we think in Nigeria today and we still can’t learn our lessons and differentiate between partisan politics and good governance. The present government of Alhaji Yar’aduaâ's VISION 2020 is indeed a good project planning if well defined and implemented. There are certain questions that need to be answered if we wish to make headway;

 

First, what are these set goals we want to achieve?

Second, to this current government who obviously will not be in power to see the accomplishment of these project, it has automatically made it a long term project, so the question the president needs to ask here is how do we accomplish a long term project even after we have vacated the sits? Will the VISION be a regime portfolio? That would be devastating.

Third, what are the materials to work with to see to these set goals? These include human, financial and other raw materials that are viable to the accomplishment of the set goals.

Forth, are the materials we have chosen relevant and coherent with the projects?

Fifth, what plans do we have on ground to take care of short term and minor projects that would raise their heads on our way to achieving the long term projects?

Based on the above questions, we have to applaud the government for realizing that we have problems which need to be attended to by setting up the goals. But thatâ's not all, how can we appraise the steps so far taking to achieve these goals?

From the look of things, there is no clear and definite view of what the VISION 2020 project is focused on, we keep talking about power, roads, employment, improved standard of living, structural improvement, agriculture, education, good health and lots of them. Every issue that emanates from the system so to speak seems to draw attention. ‘WE CAN’T BE JACK OF ALL TRADE’, therefore the first wrong step the government has taken on the project is trying to encompass all problems that pose ugly head by the way.

The second wrong step is that the government has blatantly refused to

separate national issues from party issues.

Project as huge and demanding as the VISION 2020 should make effective and efficient use of the best materials in the country to execute it and should not be seen as an avenue to compensate politicians, individuals and party members. How on earth do we have a committee of 452 members for the execution and implementation of VISION 2020 project? Sir, we don’t need too many hands to strategize the project. We need just a few hands, just a few professional hands, experts, who shouldn’t be more than 14 people. We need just a good strategic planner, an economic analyst, a civil engineer, a town planning analyst, an educationist, an industrialist, an agriculturist and health personnel. They can be paired to bring about quality deliberation before reaching a final conclusion on the project execution.

They should be given a specific period to tender their report which should be passed to the house for deliberation before they are signed into law by the president. Sir, a committee of 452 members will only create problem rather than solving one. MY LETTER TO MR PRESIDENT.

 

WHY NIGERIAN ECONOMY THAT OUGHT TO BLOOM IS GLOOMING

When oil was discovered we assumed we have arrived, a land so blessed with vast natural resources decided to decline and deviate from the maximization of the other tremendous resources deposit in our land. Now that the prices of oil has crashed and will still deteriorate further, I think itâ's time we started looking inward to solving our problems and not leaving them in the hands of opportunists to determine how our

economy should run. If in axiom we want to include maximum job creation in the vision 2020 project, we have got to look towards maximizing other resources that abound in this country to help ourselves. There is no economy that is service and import oriented that will succeed. It will always be a syndrome of quick money back which will always hyper the inflationary rate in such economy, this has been Nigeriaâ's undoing over the years. Now is the time for us to revive our production orientation, start producing for ourselves and by ourselves.

We’ve got; zinc, iron ore and cast in this country, these are used to manufacture cars; the importance of agriculture can not be over emphasized if we want to maximize the resources deposited in our lands. Yes our technology has not grown to where we’d produce by ourselves, but we’ve got those companies as the Toyotas, Hondas, Nissans and host of American, Korean and German auto makers of this world doing their businesses in Nigeria, just sales. They own these companies; they create jobs with them in their various countries and only use their products to get money made in Nigeria by selling just finished products to us. We could get these companies to come and site in Nigeria, use our human and mineral resources to produce these cars at lower labour cost, by so doing our unemployed youths would have been gainfully employed, the cost of these automobiles would be drastically reduced, our technological advancement would speedily improve when we have our youths working in those automobile factories.

 

LACK OF MAINTENANCE CULTURE, A DISASTER TO NIGERIA

Anyone who learns to build but does not

learn to maintain what he builds is worse that he who does not build. This has tremendously been the undoing of Nigeriaâ's economy. It is so disheartening that we spend huge sums of money building and developing infrastructures in Nigeria only for us to look back after few years to find out that such beautiful infrastructures are left unattended to. If someone could build refineries in Nigeria and they were up and working, it shouldn’t be a hard knot for another to see that the refineries are always operational. Rather, just because of our individualism someone got to sabotage the system so as to get a right to import the same oil we produce. The effect of this is that when we take our oil to refine abroad, obviously it is not just one product that comes out of a refined oil product, therefore the other products like kerosene, engine oil, black oil, Vaseline, cottar and lots of them will either be sold/left abroad or we would import them just like petroleum. These are things we should have at no extra cost in Nigeria; above all, their processing in Nigeria should engage a lot of people in one job or the other.

 

HOW WE CAN MAKE THINGS WORK AGAIN

As we clamor for change, being among the top 20 world best economy and vying to achieve the vision 2020, it is very vital that we make sure the machineries are put in place. The issue of power should not only form the major part of the vision 2020 and economy stability, power should be engineered towards achieving the VISION. Therefore power stability should be a pre-vision 2020 project and as well form part of it for maintenance and improvement. If actually we want to attract foreign investors that will mainly be production oriented and transform our economy from consumption to production oriented and

create various jobs, power is inevitable.

It is as well of immense importance to learn to recycle our wastes. It creates jobs, it boasts the economy, and it boasts self dependence.

Health and education should be prioritized in the vision, these are projects that would develop the Nigerian citizens and productivity would be enhanced, agriculture should as well form the bedrock of the VISION.

Our banks are obviously trying, but my observation with most of our flourishing banks is that they lend out money made in Nigeria to our so-called Indian and Lebanese foreign investors who enter this country with just briefcases and are not ready to fix any single structure of their own on our land. They walk to our banks, borrow money from them and start one service or sales firm on rented offices, use the money borrowed from Nigerians to import goods and sell back to Nigerians and make fortune out of Nigerians and we all celebrate them as our foreign investors. When there is a little crisis in the economy, they dust their briefcases abandon their rented offices and fill their pockets with profits made from Nigerians and go their way without giving a second thought on how to make the economy better. No commitment.

We’ve got to believe in ourselves, we’ve got to make things work in this country again. If Japan could do it, if China could do it, Nigeria can do it, yes we can.