Published 2025-05-01
Abstract
History of planning in Nigeria indicates that Nigeria is in the habit of changing development strategies without allowing these strategies to be fully implemented. Thus there have been phases of development planning in Nigeria. From the review, it is evident that development plans in Nigeria right from 1946 to date has been dominated by influences from foreign countries and United Nations Agencies. During the contemporary period, the IMF and the World Bank are playing the leadership role. The voices of the poor are hardly heard directly by the government, mostly through these agencies and other Non-Government Organizations (NGOs). Similarly, the paper pointed out clearly that the habit of changing development strategies all the time cannot provide solutions to our development problems because it has much more to do with the attitudes, values, behaviours and orientations of Nigerians. And again the national planning record has been very weak. Each plan was essentially a laundry list of projects, some rolled over from the one before. The rolling plans for instance was designed to operate within the context of more comprehensive fifteen- to twenty-year plans; but there was no any perspective plan to guide it. As a result, it has proved irrelevant to the budgeting and financial management process. The dominant mode has been medium term planning with no serious attempt at systematic, integrated and targets-oriented planning. The paper therefore recommended among others that the task of re-branding Nigeria should aimed at reorienting, inspiring and motivating Nigerians being called PRIDE. An acronym for Patriotism, Resourcefulness, Integrity, Distinction and Enterprise. We therefore hope that if genuinely pursuit all the problems militating against effective implementation of development plans in Nigeria would be a matter of history.