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121 CHAPTER 6 INTRODUCTION For those who have been following the economic trend in Nigeria, the country ’s quest to become one of the twenty most industrialised nations in the world has been a front burner issue of policy discourse. In the year 2007, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and World Fact Book listed Nigeria as the 41st country on the list of developed economies based on GDP comparison. The World Bank had also listed Nigeria as the 40th industrialised country in its own analysis. The three sources had listed USA, Japan, Germany, China and United Kingdom as the first five industrialised nations of the world. These rankings had assiduously prompted Nigeria government to pursue developmental policies that will not only transform Nigeria’s economy, but also project the country as one of the 20th industrialised nations in the world by the year 2020. In order to achieve this vision (Vision 20: 2020) Adewoye (2010) had opined that the nation’s economy needs to develop at a rate fast enough to overtake more than 20 countries like Indonesia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Hong Kong amongst others within the next ten years to come. Though this desire can be viewed as a “tall” dream, most policy makers opine that this dream is somewhat achievable. The beginning point of realising this quest is by evaluating the past and present innovation, technological and industrial development strategies and policies, particularly, the Structural Adjustment Programme introduced in 1986. The SAP programme was adjudged by many economic critics to have been unsuccessful. As noted by Okoh (2004: 2): SAP was introduced to revitalise the manufacturing sub-sector through removal of over valuation of exchange rate and subsequent determination by the market forces, tariff reforms, removal of price control to enable producers Innovation Financing, Industrial production and the Growth of Nigeria’s Non-oil Exports Emmanuel Sebastian Akpan, Hodo Bassey Riman, and Helen Walter Mboto 122 CHAPTER 6 operate competitively… Despite the progress made in institutional and structural reforms, increased re-engineering of the financial sector and accelerated growth in crude oil export, it would appear that manufacturing and agro-based industries in Nigeria have not risen to the challenges of meeting up with global competition. Many researchers have blamed the failure of SAP to achieve the desired goal on (a) Ethno-centric location of industries, particularly, in non-productive areas (Adejugbe,1980); (b) Lop-sided relationship in the world trade order, the forces of globalisation, extent of competition in the domestic economy, and the extent and order of economic liberalisation (Afangideh and Obiora, 2004); (c) Weak and decaying infrastructures, high cost of importation of machineries for production, poor technical knowledge of the use and operations of these machineries and high and rigid import tariffs (Riman and Akpan, 2010); and (d) Poor utilisation of industrial technology, particularly, the use of obsolete technology, low skill in the usage of these machineries, and mal-application of imported technology (Essia, 2004). What stands out clearly in the discourse above is the fact that the industrialisation process in Nigeria has been built on faulty foundation. Gwynne (1990) demonstrated that industrialisation growth should be rooted in the constant adaptation and improvement of imported technologies. This opinion could be regarded as the strong pointer as to why the Asian ‘miracle’ economies are described as fastest growing economies in the world. For instance, the Indonesian economy (which is also one of the fastest growing economies among the HPAEs) had also suffered periods of slump and recovery like most developing nations in SSA including Nigeria. During the 32 years of “New Order” rule (1966–1998) the Indonesian economy experienced rapid and sustained growth, which enabled Indonesia to graduate from the ranks of one of the poorest countries in the mid-1960s to one of the eight “high-performing Asian economies” (HPAEs) in the early 1990s, along with Japan, the four “Asian tigers”, and Indonesia’s two Southeast Asian neighbors , Malaysia and Thailand (World Bank, 1996). It is observable that all the policies and programmes that Indonesia government had instituted to revamp their economy were the same policies and programmes that the Nigeria government had likewise instituted in collaboration with the World Bank and IMF to revamp Nigeria’s ailing industrial economy. Over the years, the SAP programme recommended by IMF and the World Bank as the panacea to her economic downturn has been described as achieving very little success. The probing questions in the minds of economic watchers and...

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