Why sustainable growth is difficult in Nigeria

 Why sustainable growth is difficult in Nigeria

“Success is unremitting attention to purpose.”–Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister, 1804 -1881

The Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, and Vanguard Newspapers, on February 26, 2021, organised another Economic Summit at the Eko Hotels and Suites – partly designed to find a way for Nigeria to attain sustainable growth. That has proved elusive so far; and with the restriction of things, much longer than.We are thinking to have any hopes of achieving it.

Before you dismiss that statement as the pronouncements of a doomsayer, please be patient enough to examine the evidence.

“Those who deal in ideas, if they are wise, will welcome attack. Only a peaceful passage should dismay them for it proves the ideas do not affect anyone very much.”– Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, 1908-2006.

I have written continuously on the Business/Economic pages ofVanguardsince 1988. Incidentally, my first Editor was Lanre Alabi who helped organise this latest Economic Summit which was a collaborative effort. I had an obligation to be there despite my feeling of Economic Summit fatigue in Nigeria. The communiqués, the brilliant ideas which got participants clapping invariably end up gathering dust in Aso Rock.

Occasionally, some useful slogans are plucked out and used for political purposes. They are then rapidly discarded when no more propaganda value can be derived from them.

The year 2020 ended two months and one week ago. Few Nigerians old enough can recollect that in 1992, a group of Nigeria’s best and brightest minds gathered in Abuja and pronounced that, based on planned sustainable growth, Nigeria would become one of the largest twenty economies in the world by 2020. That was the VISION 2020. I was the lone voice calling it DELUSION 2020. History would record that, in 2020, the Nigerian economy grew by -1.92 per cent. And, we are nowhere near top 20. Why? Because, the sustainable growth that would have made the vision possible was not achieved. The next question is: why? That is easy to answer; and the answer provides some of the reasons sustainable growth is impossible for now.