How Politics stifled development projects
Today’s post will focus on one example of how development projects in Nigeria have been sabotaged by politics and TNC influence. We will focus on the case of Nigerian River Basin Development Authorities (RBDAs).
RBDAs in Nigeria were founded for the sole purpose of planning,
facilitating and nurturing socioeconomic development of the Nigerian people
dependent on the nation’s rivers. This sort of river basin planning, as
formulated and supported by the UN, offered an adequate framework for development
which bypassed existing inadequate agencies and processes (Adams,
1985). Unfortunately, this kind of development produced quite disappointing
results in Nigeria.
The RBDAs functions were wide as they dealt with irrigation,
flood and population control, watershed management, fisheries, navigation, food
and seed processing and livestock breeding. These functions were set on purpose
to cover many sectors of development (Adams,
1985). Unfortunately, this only led to RBDAs relying on the construction of
large-scale projects such as dam projects (Adams,
1985). Dams, once considered very popular hard engineering development
schemes, are observed with more nuance and been criticised for stunting development
in many cases. For example, the Bakolori Dam on the River Sokoto in Northwest
Nigeria caused a large reduction in the magnitude of wet season water flow
which supported the main agricultural and fishery economy of 50,000 Nigerians
who lived downstream (Adams,
1985). Considering that facilitating agriculture and fisheries was a priority
for the RBDAs it was these kinds of projects that they should’ve moved away
from but instead were doubled down. RBDAs also failed to reduce bureaucracy and
inefficiency in rural development, much of this was because the RBDAs, which were
federal agencies, often competed and clashed with local state agencies operating
in the same areas (Adams,
1985).
The RBDAs had limited success and failed to change
ineffective development strategies and failed to bypass bureaucracy. So why did
RBDAs disappoint?
The big answer is politics. Firstly, the RBDA schemes were
purposefully placed in regions where opposition parties to the ruling federal government
parties had support as opposed to placing such schemes in regions that needed
them (Adams,
1985). For federal government politicians it appears that the RBDA schemes were
more important to function as a means to gain support from those regions and
hence weaken political rivals than to actually help these regions.
Another important thing to note is that many of the large-scale
projects were built via foreign engineering companies and were financed from
oil exploitation (Adams,
1985). This means that it was vital for Nigeria to continue oil extraction and
in fact increase it to finance the expensive projects. This explains why such
ineffective and expensive projects were utilised, not necessarily to aid
development but to promote more oil extraction hence more revenue for the oil
companies and politicians funded by such companies. Knowing how large the Nigerian
governance reliance on oil TNCs is, it makes sense that they would push such
policies to aid their donors’ revenue (Frynas,
1998).
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