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August 22, 2024 6:47 pmOver the last two or so decades, the view seems to have taken root in Nigeria that we can somehow sing, dance, code, post, brand and speculate our way into meaningful development. This is an illusion; it is not going to happen—certainly not soon enough to make much of a difference in the conditions under which most of us live.
The next big, identifiable moment, was the arrival of Donald Duke as governor of Cross River State. The young governor as he then was, got the entire country—from President Olusegun Obasanjo to nominally staid bankers and the general populace—charged up about the prospect of turning his state into a veritable tourist paradise.
Also facilitated and enhanced by the internet and social media is so-called multi-level marketing in which mostly nostrums of dubious efficacy in the form of pills, capsules and liquid concoctions are peddled by everybody everywhere one turns. Mention must be made too, of sports betting . While sports gambling in the form of football pools, with addicts drawn mostly from the lowest rungs of the social ladder, has been around for many decades, the internet has taken sports betting mainstream.
Such Third World countries, it has been claimed, could leapfrog to services and thence, to developed status. As the IMF , one of the key advocates of this view put it, the premature turn to services, “need not hinder economy-wide productivity growth and the prospects for developing economies to gain ground toward advanced-economy income levels”
We are also notoriously deficient in domestic production capability across an embarrassingly wide range of industrial sectors. We lack capacity in basic industries—iron, steel, aluminum, alloys , machine tools, textiles, chemicals other than petroleum derivatives; even wood and paper and last but not least, food .
It is well known that productivity growth is more easily achieved in manufacturing and agriculture where machines and tools can be pressed into service to increase output per worker. While the same can be done in some aspects of services, especially ICT-enabled services, productivity growth in that sector tends to be slower. To achieve rapid productivity and therefore income growth, policy emphasis on primary and secondary production is essential for a country like ours at this point.
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