By Lucky Okoedion
One of the several reasons the Nigerian economy is always one step forward and several more backward is because we are in a hurry to jump the fundamentals needed to build a strong industrial economy, which is to patiently build indigenous technology. We have to hurriedly get rid of our political “top-to-bottom” approach to development and adopt a bottom-up approach. Innovative industrial initiatives should be happening from the grassroots at the subsistence level. Instead of relying on going abroad to import expatriates and assembly lines needed for large scale industrial production by a few “big money” entrepreneurs and government bodies that can afford it, what we need is the proliferation of innovation and industry at the grassroots level, the same way our music and other creative industries laid their foundation which has proven sustainable today. We should stop putting the cart before the horse when it comes to technological advancement.
Successive governments in Nigeria have tried different approaches in laying an economic foundation for the country. Earlier in the life of this nation, there was an attempt by our so-called “heroes past” to put the cart before the horse by approving an industrialization policy that entailed turning Nigeria into an industrial nation overnight without going through the prerequisite process of developing indeginous technology. This delivered a fake impression of success at the time as the economy seemed to be performing well at that time, as a result. But like most inorganic “growth” initiatives, that fake economic success collapsed sooner than later as that policy required us to always import almost all the factors of industrialization. I am referring to the Nigerian past when most car manufacturing companies had assembly plants in many cities in Nigeria, making Nigeria look like an industrial nation. There were also textile mills.
That industrialization initiative was given most of the support it needed to succeed, such as government patronage. Older Nigerians alive today can recall that there was a time when all government vehicles were locally assembled. This support could have helped that industrialization strategy to succeed at the time, except that it was not possible for such an industrialization strategy to succeed because it was a fake or artificial “success”. The reason being that the initiative lacked the ability to sustain itself. It breached the first principle of business success which is control over the factors and recipe of production. You cannot sustain what you cannot control. Our leaders of that era should have known that what they were building was not industrialization but a future economic graveyard since everything was imported in that initiative – the technology was imported, the engineers and technicians were mostly imported, there were no locally sourced raw materials, Nigerians who worked in those plants did not receive any substantial technology knowledge transfer because nothing was manufactured here. All assembled parts were 100% manufactured abroad. All our people had to do was to join in assembling the components.
Worse still, the Nigerian leaders of that era ought to have known that such an approach would fail because there certainly was going to be a time as we are in now when it would be too expensive to import all the manufactured components and still be able to produce at a marketable scale and price. But we can assume that they put their political interests first, and before the true needs of the nation and our future, as usual.
However, this generation must be determined to do things differently. You cannot do the same thing and expect a different result. We have to go bottom-up. We need our local governments to have autonomy so that they can provide the grassroots leadership needed for an evenly spread technological initiative that carries everyone along, including local artisans in the villages. Not the current “big man” and “big money” industrial initiatives located only in the state capital cities.
Lucky Okoedion is a believer of a new Nigeria where true democracy is practiced. He writes from Benin City, Nigeria. He can be reached on +2347038820118.
