Vision 2020: Illusion or delusion?
Nigerian leaders
are good at
conceiving and seeing visions, which later turn out to be illusions and sometimes, grand delusions. In 1978, Obasanjo conceived a vision to feed the nation hence the invention of Operation Feed the Nation. Shehu Shagari’s Green Revolution was also transformed into a ‘yellow revolution’, with an astronomical increase in the importation of rice and other staple foods. The Abacha administration initiated the vision 2010.
The vision of the bespectacled General was intended to grow the economy through the promotion of small and medium scale industries, providing access to information relating to opportunities for credit. The vision was a still-born as it was undermined by poverty and inability of government to provide the basic infrastructure for industrial take-off.
Nigeria has never lacked beautiful policies but implementation and policy inconsistency are two challenges the nation is yet to overcome. This is true of many transitional societies that are democratising. When Obasanjo mounted the saddle, he launched the New Nigerian Economic Policy in the first term of his administration.
The fundamental objectives of the new economic thinking were to revive and grow Nigeria’s comatose economy with a view to improving the standard of living of the people. It was also designed for creating job opportunities and to re-position the economy within the context of an overall global economy.
A few years ago we produced NEEDS (1), and while the impact of NEEDS (1) is yet to be felt or its performance evaluated in the light of contemporary economic realities, we have come up with NEEDS 2, to tell the world that Nigeria’s home grown economic strategy is working.
In fact, some of the clowns in CBN will even mesmerise the masses that we will soon overtake Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and other Asian tigers. In a fast-globalising world where knowledge rules the world, how can Nigeria make progress when our educational system is in terrible jeopardy?
It is not arguable that Nigeria needs a vision to take it out of the doldrums. What is however still in contention is on the strategies to re-engineer the Nigerian state, its institutional capacities and operations and more importantly to rejuvenate the economy so that the ordinary Nigerian can boast and have confidence in the Nigerian state.
Successive administrations had looked for many escape routes, some of them so very tortuous that they aggravated rather than cure the malaise.
Our visions fail because they fail to address the issue of state resources being appropriated by a handful of persons at the expense of the masses. Thus the same group of persons who appropriate the commonwealth cannot turn out to be poverty alleviators of the poor people they created.
Therefore, the utopianism being popularised by ‘miracle workers’ that by 2020 Nigeria will join the league of the 20 largest economies in the world can only be a grandiose delusion. It is a vision designed to sustain the fate of the down trodden until they are snuffed out of existence.
In all ramifications Nigeria is failing. Nigeria has manifested all the symptoms of failure in power supply, education, health care delivery services, roads and other basic infrastructure. It is because our leaders have refused to acknowledge our failure that our visions can only end up in the realm of hallucinations, illusions and in extreme cases delusions.
Idumange John,
Niger Delta University,
Bayelsa State.
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