Tony Momh
13 July 2008
opinion
IT is deliberate to use the strong word "assassinate" in describing the fate of NEEDS on which former President Olusegun Obasanjo anchored his dream of Nigeria becoming one of the 20 strongest nations on earth by the year 2020.
That is if it is true that the Yar'Adua administration is opting to achieve the same goal outside the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy programme which Obasanjo saw as superior to Vision 2010.
What it means is that we are going back to the drawing board. And what it means is that one more approach to economic development is dead, and we are back to square one. It is sad. Sad because the very reason Obasanjo went hunting for faithful successors was to ensure that they depended on him for guidance in running this country.
Not just for guidance, but for instructions. They seem to be doing neither, and if you are not glad that they want to be themselves, I am.
The problem, however, is that those who did not bring anything into government because they did not prepare to govern at the level they are at, will grope for ideas and help. The ideas are flowing in from many people and from many places; and that is the rub. We may be misled.
I have never had faith in NEEDS as the all-cure for our economic and development ailment. I preferred the Vision 2010 document and for six weeks, under the title of When We Are 50, from September 10 to October 15, 2006, I told you about the greatness of that document as a working paper in all fields a nation needs to develop in.
You can see what I had to say in Democracy Watch, A Monitor's Diary, Volume 2, pages 194-215. When Obasanjo was dragging Umar Yar'Adua and Goodluck Jonathan all over the stage at campaign rallies for the 2007 elections, he gave them no time to say what they had planned to do for us if they won.
They were invited to debate their programme in Abuja at the ECOWAS Secretariat. They agreed to be there. They did not show up.
All through the campaigns, Obasanjo did all the speaking, giving them only a few minutes to say, in the name of continuity, that they would be faithful to the reform programme of the president.
So they articulated no economic programme nor did they tell us what their party, the PDP, would do. With the coming of the duo after the elections, we began to hear more loudly the mouthing of a seven-point agenda. Was it or is it a PDP promise for us to ensure our welfare and security?
Is it, like NEEDS, a personal contribution that someone wanted to make to our national recovery efforts? With what has been happening since the promoters and executors of NEEDS evaporated politically, do we see the seven-point agenda as a replacement for NEEDS or its executory phase? I am raising the questions, not to defend NEEDS but to help bury it.
The truth, however, is that we cannot replace it with a less persuasive option. We have to go back to bring out the Vision 2010 where it was kept to gather dust.
And, yes, it was left to gather dust; not because those who filed it away loved Nigeria less, but because they hated Abacha more. Yet Abacha was no author of Vision 2010.
I know because he told me. We have had economic plans in the past, but it was in the time of Abacha that the most profound work was done on the way we must take to achieve growth acceptable to serious-minded people.
The effort emerged in a document we have come to call the Vision 2010 Document. It was envisaged in 1997 that by the year 2010, when we would have been 50 years old as an independent country, we would have fully appreciated where we had been, where we wanted to be, and how we worked to get there.
The areas to be attended to were fully defined. They included education, health, industry, petroleum, solid minerals, agriculture, infrastructures, poverty alleviation, rural and urban development, unemployment, small and medium scale enterprises, women, youth, information systems, industrial relations, reward system, public and private sector partnership, stable policy environment, law and order, anti-corruption, good governance, external image and capital mobilization.
Vision 2010 was not a product of an egg head working in the Ministry of National Planning and having one or two others endorsing the proposals. The committee was set up on November 27, 1996.
There were 248 members, including 25 foreign stakeholders residing in Nigeria. There were 14 areas to look into. They had to develop a blueprint that would transform Nigeria and place it firmly on the route to becoming a developed nation by the year 2010. That is just two years from now, if we had stuck to the dreams anchored in that document.
I have not met anyone who has anything superior to the work done over a period of 10 months, and in spite of what anyone may assert, Chief Earnest Sonekan, I still maintain, must remain a national icon whose name cannot be missing when the future sets down to look at what Nigerians can do with planning.
The Committee considered 750 memos from the public. There were presentations from guest speakers, brainstorming among committee members.
There were 12 workshops, 57 external workshops and specially commissioned studies. Fifty-three sub-committees and eight clusters of sub-committee covered 13 critical success factors, 17 economic issues, six general issues.
Their dream was that by the year 2010 when we would be 50 years old, our country would have been transformed into "a united, industrious, caring and God-fearing democratic society, committed to making the basic needs of life affordable for everyone, and creating Africa's leading economy."
This process should start with the launching of the Vision 2010 by the head of state, commander-in-chief.
The launching address should convince every Nigerian that this time around, government was committed to implementation of plans.
You know what Abacha did to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. Little wonder then that when he assumed office on May 29, 1999, he would not do what a more forgiving and patriotic leader would have done - set up an implementation outfit of the laudable dreams of Vision 2010.
He was to say later that he did not believe in the document because he did not see how someone (Abacha) who had no sight could have a vision!
Vision 2010 is different because NEEDS misses out on the basic things that Vision 2010 addresses, which include what would amount to a restructured relationship between the different tiers of government, like relocating certain key areas of responsibility to the states and local governments and funding them adequately through revised revenue allocation arrangements.
I did say then and I am still of the view that a political empowerment programme which Vision 2010 represents is more important for us, and should be a prerequisite for or the basis for a successful economic empowerment programme. In other words, decongest the political space and economic deregulation is automatic.
The structures you set up to drive the growth programme will then hold. NEEDS was trumpeted as Nigeria's home-grown poverty reduction strategy. It was supposed to have been the product of "wide consultative and participatory processes" which would make NEEDS "not just a plan on paper", but "a plan on the ground and founded on a clear vision, sound values, and enduring principles."
What attracted me to the NEEDS programme was the claim that as a medium term strategy, 2003-2007, it "derives from the country's long-term goals of poverty reduction, wealth creation, employment generation and value re-orientation." But nowhere did I see any reference to the country's long-term goals.
And although NEEDS was supposed to be "a nationally coordinated framework of action in close collaboration with the State and Local governments... and other stakeholders to consolidate on the achievements of (1999-2003) and build a solid foundation for the attainment of Nigeria's long-term vision of becoming the largest and strongest African economy and a key player in the world economy", I did not see any antecedent efforts that constituted the foundation on which we built when we started the journey from 1999.
In writing and campaigning for Vision 2010 being the foundation for our take-off, I did not ignore what NEEDS has been trying to do.
I said and still say that NEEDS did not seem to recognize that there was Vision 2010 which has a broader base of consultation and a better claim to being homegrown. No one pretends that NEEDS is a Federal Government proposal for growing Nigeria.
It is "essentially a federal government programme", the authors of NEEDS rightly claim. So what? The fact that it is a programme groomed in the offices of officialdom is reflected in how it came to be.
The 35-member committee that drafted the NEEDS document comprised "ministers, representatives of ministries and agencies, president of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, president of the Nigerian Labour Congress, chairman of the Coalition of Civil Society Organizations, the Nigerian Economic Summit Group, etc."
The proof that it is not an all-stake-holders programme is revealed in the acceptance that "further consultations are planned in the near term to get further inputs from major stakeholders that have not yet had a chance to contribute to the NEEDS, and thus ensure a fully participatory approach to the NEEDS design".
Vision 2010 was different. With NEEDS sunk out of national sight, we are trumpeting a seven-point agenda that the ruling party does not seem to have endorsed or approved, not to speak of the people of Nigeria who must bear the pains of lack of focus working in public office has revealed.
The death of NEEDS should see the birth or rebirth of Vision 2010. Anything outside it is going to be an unproductive hunt in a forest without tracks.
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