Obstacles to achieving Vision 2020, by Nnamani
From Isa Abdulsalami, Jos
FORMER Senate President, Ken Nnamani has doubted the realisation of the much-touted Federal Government's vision 2020, saying odds are stacked against its achievement.
"If Nigeria is bent on achieving it", according to him, "it has to work twice or even thrice as hard to get there within the allotted time".
Nnamani spoke at the weekend when he was delivering the yearly distinguished lecture at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), to mark the institute's 30th anniversary and the graduation of Senior Executive Course 31 participants.
Comparing Nigeria to Indonesia, he said the latter came out of dictatorship with better infrastructure for economic development than the former, adding that while Indonesia dictators were mainly nationalists, their Nigerian counterparts were pathologically selfish.
Essentially, he stressed that to achieve vision 2020, Nigeria has to out-perform China and India in net economic growth.
"No matter the nobility in vision 2020, it seems to me that no sustainable development is possible without a clearly articulated set of guiding human values anchored on nationally accepted ethics. Our national economic development needs to be built on human values and national ethics that are truly Nigerian and part of our history and heritage.
"Because of our short history and the divisive nature of our politics, such values and ethics must be aggressively, purposively and strategically promoted by the federal, state and local governments, as well as other institutions and agencies of the public, private and non-profit sectors.
"In the absence of values and ethics as guiding principle for vision and development, we will be groping in the dark and middling our way from one problem to another, with no lasting solutions in sight," he said.
According to him, Nigeria has experimented with multiple national development plans and varied growth paradigms.
He added that some of the development plans were truly indigenous and original, while some were borrowed like Operation Feed the Nation (OFN), National Economic Empowerment Development Strategies (NEEDS), State Economic Empowerment Development Strategies (SEEDS), War Against Indiscipline (WAI) and so on.
Nnamani, who faulted past approaches to all the development plans, said that for the nation to still continue to search for a new development formula today is a testimony to the inadequacy of past approaches.
He explained that one fundamental shortcoming of all the approaches is that they were not properly articulated and conceptualised.
"For example, we can recite the seven-point agenda and sloganeer about how Nigeria will become the 20th largest economy in the world in 2020, but we must begin to specify and implement those steps most critical to realising vision 2020 or the seven-point agenda.
"Another major drag on efforts to implement the vision 2020 is the inability to articulate the relationship between values and economic development. The vision does not provide for moral and value-orientation as a strategic approach towards economic development in Nigeria.
"This is lamentable because as far back as 1995 under the leadership of General Sani Abacha, the vision 2010 committee argued that value orientation should form the core strategy for sustainable economic development in Nigeria," he stated.
He added: "We cannot run away from values and their role in economic development. Values matter for economic development. We cannot become one of the 20th leading economies in the world by 2020 if we are not even a productive people. Productivity is a function of values.
"The Sociologist, Max Weber, published in 1904-05 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'. The argument of this great book is that it was the protestant ethics (that is, the values of thrift, hard work and honesty) that enabled the emergence of the industrial capitalism in the West".
On governance, Nnamani argued that the cultural and moral thesis of development may have its own problems, adding however that how people view the world and their role in the world affairs affects their effectiveness and efficiency.
He posited that culture does not stand in isolation in shaping economic development. "Political leadership and the institutions people devise to solve social and economic problems affect the material prosperity they enjoy.
"For example, the culture and value of enterprise in a country can be thwarted by bad governmental home. These values will then find expression in a foreign country.
"An example of this is Nigerian police contingent always perform well in peace-keeping missions abroad but are at times incompetent and tyrannical at home, although this is changing now under a new leadership".
He suggested that Nigerians should be concerned about the kind of values that define their public life, adding that they should ask whether they have the kind of values that lead to productivity or inefficiency.
"In a country where too many of those who do not work are rewarded than those who work hard, can we really sustain fast economic development? In an economy where the majority of the so-called business class is largely a clique of contractors, reliant on government contracts, can anyone speak seriously about a transition from under-development to development?
