CHAPTER ONE

1.0       INTRODUCTION

One of the primary purposes of every government is to improve the welfare of its citizenry. The basic idea of welfarism encompasses all concerted efforts directed towards the betterment and the improvement of the living standard of the people thereby achieving economic development.  Nigeria is a country endowed with abundant human, material and natural resources. These vast resources are capable of forming a solid base for socioeconomic development, granted political leadership, good governance and exemplary leadership as well as the development in human skills. Nigeria has a high potential of becoming a great nation.

At independence, Nigeria had a high expectation of launching into a take-off stage within a reasonable period of time. However, the economy was dualistic with a large traditional agricultural-based rural sector and a small modern urban sector. Most of the manufacturing industries and almost all the modern infrastructures were located in the urban areas. The majority of the people lived and farmed in the rural areas with little or no economic/social infrastructure, neither had they the required skills to develop themselves.

The developmental challenges that face the post-independence government were enormous. These developmental challenges included at the minimum, the provision of education and health services to the people, the provision of social and economic infrastructures to the vast majority of the people, the management of the vast human and material resources and the development of people’s skills toward enhancing their economic wellbeing. It is worth noting that the manner in which some of these challenges were addressed was the adoption of a four-year demand management economic policy in the form of economic stabilization Act of 1982, the austerity programme of 1984 and the National Economic Emergency Measures of 1985 for economic recovery and self-reliance. But all had only marginal effects because of lack of continuity in past policies. And a two-year Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) had to be adopted to broaden the productive and resource base of the economy, eliminate distortion, reduce the role of government, encourage competition and make the economy self-reliant.

The inability of SAP to achieve its stated objectives was attributed to its short-time frame, and the poor sequencing of its reform, couple with the general poor implementation of policies, policy instability and lack of political will of most administration to continue with the existing policies.

It is obvious that due to policy errors, stay-maid by non-continuity in the existing policies of the past, the Nigerian economy suffered from fundamental structural defects and remained in a persistent state of disequilibrium. The productive and technological base was weak due to non-policy programmes on the development of people’s potentials, initiative and skills, the infrastructures that were urban-based were poor, inadequate and lack of maintenance, the effectiveness of incentives was low, giving rise to inadequate utilization of the factors of production.

The need for policy redirection in Nigeria became more obvious with the revelation of the consequence of the past policy errors. This policy redirection becomes imperative because, the improvement in the living condition of the people in every nation is often the major concern of every good government. Emphasis were therefore redirected on policy programmes that will develop the people’s skills, initiative, creativity and potentials with a view of empowering them to become economically productive and self-reliance mainly because of