Nigerian State and Industrialization Crises: A Lesson from Taiwan

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the crises in Nigeria’s industrialization process with the view to further interrogate the causes and consequences of this lingering crisis on the development of the country. To this end, the development miracle of Taiwan is brought into perspective, chiefly to explore her success story as one of the newly industrialized countries, and to identify the gaps Nigeria was not able to fill from the experience of Taipei. Given the above, this research adopted secondary data analysis and desktop research designs. The data and literature collected were qualitatively analyzed based on the dominant themes. The results showed that a combination of factors were responsible for the failure of Nigeria’s efforts to industrialize and these are: Lack of political will, rent-seeking behaviour of the leaders or political elites; infrastructural deficits, inadequate education and skills development; weak state institutions, ineffective government industrialization policies, bad governance, inappropriate land policy, low level of technology, the relegation of the agricultural sector and insufficient flow of FDIs, etc. As a way forward, it was recommended that Nigeria should look at the experience of Taiwan and borrow a cue from her, where necessary.