Planning Without Growth And Development
Nigeria has been achieving growth without development because it’s planning and budgeting processes lacked growth elements,
The Nigerian economy is weakened for lack of linkages; people are either acquiring theoretical principles alone or a small quantity of practical skills alone. This is the reason virtually all the 300,000 university graduates armed with the plenty theoretical principles produced in Nigeria today, join the unemployment queue
Nigeria has had many plans and budgets since independence in 1960. Nigeria had four National Development Plans in the period 1962-1985: 1962-68, 1970-74, 1975-80 and 198085. Nigeria also adopted the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) and its Rolling Plans in 1986. SAP remains the main programme Nigeria is implementing today, because the principal elements, philosophy and ideological inclination in 1986 have not changed and they have been the bases of managing the Nigerian economy. Whereas Nigerian government officials claimed to have been implementing reforms, NEEDS, Nine-point Agenda, Vision 20:2020 and Transformation Agenda, ERGP (the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan, 2017) and now Budget of Consolidation, SAP’s elements: the mandatory currency devaluation machinery (the foreign exchange market) now known by various names, privatisation of public enterprises and adoption of deregulation-(frequent increase in prices of petroleum products) as the economic philosophy for managing public projects and activities and technology transfer strategy remain the principal features of the Nigerian economy.
Some Nigerians and their foreign friends, the World Bank and IMF who have been influencing Nigeria’s economic policy over the decades, like to deceive the ignorant public that it is the name of a programme that counts, rather than the elements. They are wrong. It is the elements of a programme that determine its impact on the people. Nigeria has been achieving growth without development (GWD) for decades because Nigeria’s planning and budgeting processes have always lacked growth elements.
Economists claim that growth comes from the capital rather than the recurrent part of budget because they were brought up to believe that mere capital investment promote sustainable economic growth. But they are wrong. The research works of Charles Cobb (a mathematician) and Paul Douglas (economist) in 1928, Douglas (1948), Abramowitz (1956) and Solow (1957) showed that capital contributes very little to achieving sustainable economic growth and industrialisation. Gerschenkron (1966) examined the Western industrialisation experience and found out that capital investment was not a prerequisite to it.
Consequently, unemployment, poverty and high crime wave problems have been worsening. Also there are no physical structures to show for the trillions of naira budgets announced every year and the rapidly growing national debts. Nigerian governments have merely been wasting resources and imposing unnecessary and untold hardship on the ignorant and unsuspecting citizenry. Growth elements must be introduced into Nigeria’s planning, if the nation is to make progress. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to explain how the missing growth elements can be introduced into Nigeria’s planning and budgeting process to promote growth that makes positive impact on the people, growth that promotes competence-building (or growth that increases individual and national capabilities for solving problems including production) and growth that promotes industrialisation and transformation of the Nigerian economy from its agricultural status into an industrialised one so as to eliminate unemployment, poverty, hopelessness and high crime wave.
The industrialised European and Asian nations and the United States of America were like African nations of today, a long time ago. That is, they had agricultural economies and were unable to produce or manufacture scientific products. However, they learnt over the centuries and acquired the knowledge, skills and competences (KSCs) they now use in solving problems including manufacturing. It is for this understanding that learning is the primary basis of industrialisation that virtually all nations in the world have educational institutions today. Sadly, still, Western education (economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, etc., and related fields like accounting, management, banking, law, etc.) do not understand the science of transforming an agricultural economy into an industrialised one. Because economists and others whose expertise derived from acquiring Western education and related fields were brought up to believe that mere capital investment promotes sustainable economic growth and industrialisation, they throw money at all problems. So, economists measure changes in GDP. But it is not mere changes in GDP that Nigeria and other African nations need.