To date, there is no conclusive evidence that the Golden Fleece, a symbol of power, wealth and royalty, was ever found by Jason and the Argonauts, or that it even existed. Perhaps it is no more than a metaphor for the strivings and ambitions of everyman to overcome existential demands and to be the best that he can be.
Nigeria’s Nobel laureate in English literature, Prof Wole Soyinka, seemed to have cast a shadow on Nigeria’s future early enough when he wrote so that Igwezu, the protagonist of his pre-Independence play, The Swamp Dwellers, who thought he would live the good life in the city found out that his hopes were unfounded.
In his Independence Day speech, Nigeria’s only Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, waxed optimistic without charting a clear sense of direction. This may have been the foundation for the perennial failure of public policy in Nigeria.
In the speech, the Prime Minster seemed to be more concerned with Nigeria’s relationship with other nations and forgot to set economic, social and political goals for Independent Nigeria. It was as if Nigeria would just coast along to an assured El Dorado without stated aims and objectives.
Although he recognised “the awe-inspiring task confronting us at the very start of our nationhood,” he never set any goals for the country to achieve! That omission may just have been the reason for Nigeria’s rudderless ride in the past 64 years.
As he announced “our great day,” with “joy and pride,” and dedicated his life “to the service of our country,” little did he realise that because of his failure to set a goal, we would not be “building our nation… at the wisest pace.”
The five years and four months that his government lasted put a lie to his early boast that “the elected representatives of Nigeria (were on the verge of) proving (that they) were fully capable of managing our own affairs, both internally and as a nation.”
So, it was no surprise that the first set of Independent Nigerian leaders failed woefully, whereas the whole world was expecting so much from Nigeria, that the story of its independence made the Cover Page of Time, the most prestigious international newsmagazine.
Hopes about Nigeria were so high that pundits compared their expectation of its greatness and prosperity with that of Australia. But the testimony of the last 64 years has been more of a burst than the realization of any great expectations. For Nigeria, the Golden Fleece has proven truly elusive.
The Introduction to the Report of Nigeria’s First Development Plan of 1962 – 1968 that was prepared by a World Bank team that had not even visited Nigeria issued a caveat that showed the carelessness of Nigeria’s leadership and the disdain in which the West held them.
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The Report admitted that the “Study must of necessity be limited, since without a visit to the country, it is not possible to probe thoroughly into all the points which may not be clear. This Report must therefore be regarded as an interim view of the Plan.”
Yet the first agenda of the Plan was to take care of the West whose intention was to look out for their own interest, by paying priority attention to the issue of Balance of Payments, a euphemism for Nigeria’s ability to pay for imports it would be making from the West.
The Report noted that “As forecast in the Plan, the (current) balance of payments would be manageable over the period, but forecast depends largely upon export prices (which are determined by the West), the development of import-substitutable industries, the continuance of sound monetary and fiscal policies and restraint in general consumption.”
Then the Report sounded a note of warning: “If the Plan’s expectations in these fields are not achieved, Nigeria could be faced with severe external deficits,” deficits being another word for the debt scourge.
The Report then delivered a sledgehammer verdict by noting that the Tafawa Balewa Government had no clear plan to encourage indigenous private investments: “It is doubtful whether the Government’s administrative machine (or the bureaucrats), as at presently staffed and organized, will be able to carry out public investment at the planned rate.”
With such a premise of a ruling class that couldn’t set appropriate development goals, having little understanding of the requirements of the governance, added to the mischief of the bureaucrats and the arrival of the military on the political scene with their over-centralisation of governance, no one could expect any serious development.
And if the development plan would work at all, it would be in the interest of the metropolitan powers that drew it up in the first place. And that is what has happened to date; the Bretton Woods institutions had intended for the Nigerian economy to remain as provider of agricultural and mineral raw materials for the industries of the Western economies and would always import manufactured goods from the West.
The worst and most devastating strategic blow against the economic development of Nigeria was the import-substitution strategy that emphasized the importation of industrial production machineries, their spare parts and industrial raw materials instead of developing factories that could produce them locally.
And when the import-substitution strategy eventually collapsed, as intended by the Western advisers, Nigeria simply reverted to importation of everything, including toothpick, Pringles and adire fabric – that was produced in China because it was not cost-effective to produce them in their native Abeokuta in Ogun State.
This agrees with what Tunisian economist, Fadhel Kaboud, identifies as the intention of the metropolitan economies that is taken from the rule book of Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, to retain Third World nations as sole providers of cheap raw materials, consumers of cultural and technological know-how and stay permanently at the bottom of global development value chain.
