Decolonization, Foreign Aid and Post-Independence Nigerian Underdevelopment

Abstract

Aside meeting Nigerian nationalist needs more than before, the decolonization period was also characterized by the intensification of the economic exploitative use of Nigeria as a colony, particularly during the Second World War. The government pursued the maximum utilization of Nigeria’s economic resources through highly rigid policies such as forced labour and drastic lowering of producer prices in order to boost production of Nigerian product such as rubber, palm oil, tin and groundnuts, which were strategic to Britain’s war effort. The government disrupted the internal marketing systems and introduced state controlled marketing of Nigeria agricultural exports. The colonial educational system was structured to produce clerks but not economically productive skilled personnel who can create wealth. This paper contend that just as colonial Nigerian society was unequal (privileged British colonists and poor Nigeria subjects), Nigeria currently suffers from inequality within the contemporary globalized international economic system mainly due to the British-imposed colonial economic model of primary products exports as the cornerstone of Nigeria’s national economy during the decades preceding independence. Instead of initiating policies that would jump-start Nigerian industrialization, the British colonial policy of dependence on primary products laid the foundation for post-independence Nigeria’s underdevelopment. Nigeria’s current crisis of development is further aggravated by decades of ineffective foreign development aid mainly because such aids are largely not negotiated but dictated, and managed by officials of the international or multilateral aid agencies who do not have adequate understanding of Nigerian development needs and circumstances. Such aids, in most cases, thus result in a worsening economy characterized by increasing unemployment, spiral inflation, hitches in the productive mechanism, and widening income inequality. This paper explores the role of British decolonization process, and foreign aid in post-independence Nigerian underdevelopment. The study concludes that home-grown approaches anchored upon good governance, effective utilization of resources, probity and accountability are crucial to Nigeria’s recovering from its current condition of underdevelopment. It adopts the historical analytical method.