A former Governance Adviser to the United Nations Development Programmes, (UNDP), Prof Sam Egwu, has blamed the failure of nation building and of development on the inability of successive leaders to lay the foundation for the transformation of the country’s economy.
Egwu, who stated this in an interview Blueprint yesterday, stressed that the visions of the founding fathers to build a country where the sense of nationhood prevailed regardless of ethnic and religious differences was substituted with a nation of primordial sentiments of ethnicity, region and religion over national identity.
He said the failure to transform the economy had resulted in a weak and mono-cultural economy, adding that the recent official data on growth of the economy was driven by the service sector instead of the traditional sectors that created jobs.
The don lamented that the collapse of manufacturing sector as well as the level of inequality among citizens has eaten deep into the fabric of the country’s unity.
Egwu further explained that the two fundamental failures of nation building and development were responsible for the acts of terror unleashed on the country and its citizens by different militant groups such as the Boko haram sect.
On the quality of discussion at the national conference, he “the political class cannot set agenda for the country as that their major concern is for immediate access to power and not for long term perspective of building a modern state.”
He said “this was responsible for the logjam over issues of revenue allocation, confusion over the Land Use Act and the debate on the creation of new states describing the recommendation for the creation of 18 states as ridiculous.”
Egwu said the tragedy of the national conference and previous conferences in their recommendations to create new states amounted to pushing forward of the agenda of the political elite at the expense of the people’s agenda.
