CHIDILI EDOZIE U14MM1190
I have been thinking of the year 2020. This must seem capricious, given the exigencies and the sheer volatility of the moment. Need I recite the litany that everyone knows so well? Twenty-wetin’? I can almost hear the reader gasp in disbelief. Twenty-wetin’? their cynicism, especially those among them who have also been paying close attention to what some of the best authorities have been saying, will have no difficulty apprehending that the year 2020 must not be the focus of the national policy dialogue.
Ler nobody call this optimism unfounded. At the height of the recession, the government’s main problem was how to find the money to payy all the bills. Now the money has been pouring in from sources expected and unexpected in such abundance that the problem nown is how to spend it. The wheel has turned full circle, from the oil-boom days of General Yakubu Gowon’s regime. The good old days are about to return, even if only slowly.
Then, an acute shortage of foreign exchange, the U.S. dollar especially, virtually grounded manufacturing. Now, there is so much foreign exchange in supply that the banks which used to hoard them and sell to buyers at rates that it would be polite to call usurious, are literally begging customers to come buy. But takes are few and far between. They are stuck with a glut.
Only two years now stand between our exit from the one and our entry into the other; between a desultory 2018 and a 2020 full of the great expectations encapsulated in vision 20:2020
Here is the first of several Vision Statements, formulated in 1999:
By 2020, Nigeria will have a large, strong diversified, sustainable and competitive economy that effectively harnesses the talents and energies of its people and responsibly exploits its natural endowments to guarantee a high standard of living and quality of life to its citizens, The Statement continued.
The whole thing had begun life as Vision 2010, in the time of the debauched dictator Sani Abacha. He inaugurated the Vision 2010 Committee in September 1996 and charged it to produce a report no later than September 1997. The Committee was chaired by Ernest Shonekan, whose tragicomic pretence of being head of state. Abacha had tolerated for 83 days before summarily kicking him out back in 1993.
Its remit was, first, to determine why, some 36 years after independence, national development lagged far behind Nigeria’s vast potential and, second, to envision where Nigeria should be in 2010, five decades after attaining sovereign rule.
In reality, the whole thing was to provide a setting for Abacha to transform himself into a civilian president, under a new Constitution that would grant him two six-year terms. He did not live to pursue his scheme.
On taking office in 1999, President Olusegun Obasanjo exhumed the Vision 2010 document, dusted it up, breathed new life into it and projected it as the blueprint for catapulting Nigeria to the league of the 20 biggest economies in the world by the year 2020. His bid to amend the constitution to allow him a third term – to implement Vision 2020, among other projects – crashed on a procedural vote on the floor of the Senate.
On succeeding Obasanjo, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua more or less embraced Vision 2020, renamed Vision 20: 2020, but his mantra was the Seven-Point Agenda. Until he died two years after taking office, it was hard to tell which was goal and which was mechanism: The Vision, or The Agenda,
Among its specific targets: By 2020, a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of not less that $900 billion and national per capita income of not less than $4,000 per year, and generation of 60,000 megawatts (mw) of electricity by 2020. These targets, Vice President (as he then was) Goodluck Jonathan said while launching the Vision Document, might even be achieved earlier.
In fact, Jonathan could hardly wait until 2020 for Nigeria to be counted in the league of world’s 20 largest economies. His administration re-calibrated the economic data and came up with the finding that Nigeria, not South Africa as was generally supposed, had far and away the largest economy in Africa, and the 16th largest in the world. And as if the Vision was not sufficiently freighted already, he grafted an Industrial Revolution on it.
Given present realities, it seems clear that the targets set out so clearly and eloquently in all the Vision documents are unlikely to be achieved. When 2020 comes two years hence, will Paradise be postponed again? That won’t be the first time.
Most of the good things in Vision 20:2020 and its antecendents were supposed to bring should have become commonplace some 18 years ago, in 2000, the magical year that marked all at once the end and the beginning of a decade, a century and a millennium, a conflation that occurs only once in a thousand years.
That was the year Paradise was going to be regained.
There would be education for all, health for all, shelter for all, water for all, transportation for all, food for all, clothing for all, shelter for all, and money for all. There would be absolutely no need to worry about admissions into schools and universities, for there would be enough places for everyone. Hunger would vanish from the land, and so would homelessness and disease.
When they were peddling these nostrums in the 1980s, the target year of 2000 seemed quite safe. Almost like a thief in the night, it came and went. But the Paradise it promised never came. In Nigeria, it was postponed, until 2020. And now that 2020 is nigh upon, and with everything indicating that the targets are unlikely to be achieved, will Paradise have to be postponed again, perhaps to 2030, 2040, even 2050?
President Muhammadu Buhari’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (2018-2020) two years late in the making, treads basically the same paths and promises the same outcomes as the Vision Documents I have here examined, though couched in far less portentous tones. One can only hope that its will fare better than what came before.
A much earlier Paradise envisioned in the Second National Development Plan (1970-74) launched shortly after the end of the civil war, a time of giddy optimism when Nigerians thought all things possible and petrodollars poured at a rate that overwhelmed the national exchequer, should not pass unremarked.
The goals of the Plan were to establish Nigeria firmly as
A strong, self-reliant nation;
A great and dynamic economy;
A just and egalitarian society;
A land of bright and full opportunities for all citizens, and
A free and democratic society.
It hardly got off the drawing board. Less than a decade later, President Shehu Shagari was setting up a Presidential Task Force, supervised by one of the most influential members of his cabinet, to import rice.
Some five decades and several Vision Documents later, how to produce enough rice for Nigeria’s teeming population lies at the heart of the national policy dialogue and the prospect of generating enough electricity recedes with each passing day. Toothpicks remain high on the import list.