Penultimate Monday, Dr Shamsudeen Usman, the Minister of National Planning confirmed what has been an open secret all along about the fate of the Vision 2010 document, General Sani Abacha’s blueprint for the transformation of Nigeria from an under-developed economy in to an “African Tiger” by 2010. Former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, Usman said during a breakfast interactive with members of the National Technical Working Group (NTWG) of Vision 20:2020, rejected the document not on its merit but simply because it was initiated by his Great Traducer – Abacha.

The reader may recall that in September 1996, General Sani Abacha, then in his third year as head of state, inaugurated a 174-member committee – it later grew to about 250 - to work out a blueprint for the economic transformation of Nigeria. Abacha appointed Chief Ernest Shonekan, the man he had ousted as interim head of state in November 1993, as chairman and gave the committee a year to carry out its assignment.

The Shonekan committee met its deadline and submitted what, by common consent, was a well-thought-out 10-year development plan to Abacha in September 1997. Nine months later the general died suddenly amidst heated controversy over his plan to succeed himself through the elections he’d planned for the following year.

He was succeeded by his Chief of Defense Staff, General Abdussalami Abubakar who gave himself 11 months to hand over to civilians. This gave him no time to do anything other than conduct an election. Obasanjo won the election hands down.

One of his first acts in office was to repudiate virtually everything his predecessor – and by extension Abacha – did without much consideration for their merit or lack of it.

As if in response to criticisms of his repudiation of the Vision 2010 document, Obasanjo decided to create his own development blueprint. He called it NEEDS, the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy, and claimed it was the first “home-grown reform programme.” “For the first time,” he said in the Forward to the document published by the National Planning Commission in 2004, “we have embarked on an extensive and participatory process involving major stakeholders…”

An 18-page summary of the 118-page document entitled “Overview” claims that the NEEDS Vision was based “on the Constitution; the Kuru Declaration ; previous initiatives, such as Vision 2010, and the widespread consultation and participation throughout Nigeria.”

Anyone who has read the NEEDS document knows that it is anything but homegrown. It may have been written by Nigerians – essentially by members of Obasanjo’s famous Economic Reform Group – but it was not much different from the infamous “Washington Consensus” of the Washington DC based “unholy trinity” comprising the American Treasury Department, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a consensus which prescribes the same medicine of privatization, deregulation, downsizing, withdrawal of all subsidies, etc, for all ailing underdeveloped economies.

As for the claim that NEEDS was arrived at after widespread participation by Nigerians and was based on the Constitution and the Kuru Declaration and Vision 2010 document, the claim is of doubtful validity, to say the least. First, as a draft document few Nigerians knew or heard about it, much less participate in drawing up the final version. Fewer Nigerians still heard of the Kuru Declaration, much less know what it was all about. Second, far from NEEDS being based on the Constitution it actually contradicted it to the extent that it sought to undermine the Constitution’s section on the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy which envisages a big role for government in the economy.

In this respect NEEDS was not much worse than Vision 2010 which gave privatisation and liberalisation the central role in the economic transformation of the country. To attain its goal of returning Nigeria to the rank of middle income countries by 2010, the document said, “the private sector should become a lot more active, within a market-oriented, highly competitive, broad-based, private sector driven development process.”

Still the Vision 2010 document was better than NEEDS if only because it was more homegrown than NEEDS and was more readable. Little wonder then that President Umaru Yar’adua embarked on creating his own blueprint through a method similar to Abacha’s, except for the understandable smaller size of Yar’adua’s committee and the limited time it was given to do its job – a little under four months as against Abacha’s 12.

Will Yar’adua’s blueprint be a fundamental departure from Vision 2010 or even NEEDS? I doubt it, not least because the consultants that handled Abacha’s are the same ones handling Yar’adua’s and they are ideological bedfellows of the authors of NEEDS.

However, even if the Vision 20: 2020 document can depart from the other documents it is obvious that its goal of lifting Nigeria into the world’s top twenty countries by the year 2020 is not realistic. If, as it generally agreed, Nigeria cannot meet the less ambitious general goal set by the United Nations of halving the number of its citizens who live on less than a dollar a day by 2015, it is merely day dreaming to think we can become even a middle income country in 11 years time.

The reasons why 20: 2020 is wishful thinking are as many as they are obvious. Among these is the decay in our infrastructure and our seeming inability to fix them. Another and even more important factor is the deficit in the integrity and compassion of our leaders. Yet another is the inadequacies, internal and external, of our mass media as instruments for educating and mobilizing the people for realizing our dreams.

One of these inadequacies is its seeming in ability to put a human angle to the mindboggling statistics of the looting of the public treasury that fill our air and fill the pages of our newspapers and magazines. It is only when the ordinary man can be made to see clearly that the stealing by his political leader who poses as the champion of his tribe or religion is not just mere statistics but the thing that deprives him of so many schools for his children or so much maternity care for his pregnant wife or so much electricity for his home, etc, that the war against corruption, as probably the single biggest obstacle to his progress, can be successfully fought.

If Vision 20:2020 is wishful thinking does it not then follow that it is a waste of time and money? I don’t think this is necessarily so. I do have my reservations about the appropriateness of its freewheeling free-market strategies for our economic circumstances but it is good to aim high in setting out one’s objectives. I believe even with its free-market strategies the document can bring about considerable progress in the country - if only our politicians can show an honesty of purpose in carrying out their responsibilities.

On their current showing this is probably too much to hope for.

Correction

Just read your column (of last Wednesday) and noticed a little over sight. General Ibrahim Babangida’s second son is Aminu not Ahmed as you stated. Allah ya kara maka hikima. (May God give you more wisdom).

Abdull-Azeez Ahmed Kadir,

New Nigerian Newspapers Ltd, Kaduna.



I stand corrected.