Leadership and the Nigerian Economy

Victor E. Dike

SAGE Open, 2014, vol. 4, issue 1, 2158244014523792

Abstract: The Nigerian economy is largely oil-based. Some people would rather say it is a mono-product economy. The economy has been in dire straits over the years, because of a combination of the neglect of education, especially technical and vocational education and science-based technology education, poor leadership and governance, corruption, as well as poor monetary and fiscal policies. All these have made a review of the poor investment in human capital development and infrastructure and institutions that drive the Nigerian economy and national development rather compelling. The political leaders have always raised the people’s hope by painting glowing pictures of their development plans and how they would stimulate the economy and improve the people’s living conditions. Thus, they swore that they would give priority attention to human capital development and national development, and empower the citizens, particularly the poorly educated, unskilled, and unemployed youths, with relevant human skills capital and entrepreneurial skills to enable them to contribute profoundly to national development. Yet the political leaders have, over the years, failed to adequately fund education and strengthen the infrastructure and institutions that would drive the economy and create employment for the teeming population. Both the new-breed politicians, like the old politicians before them, are promising to transform the nation into an industrialized society and the people cannot hold their expectations. The reality though is that Nigeria cannot become an industrialized society without investing abundantly in human capital development (education and health), leadership, and technological capabilities, which means investing in the future development of the nation.

Keywords: economic development; economic science; economics education; political economy; social science; curriculum; education; educational research; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244014523792 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:4:y:2014:i:1:p:2158244014523792

DOI: 10.1177/2158244014523792

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().