Impressed by the development trajectory of Brazil, President Bola Tinubu has vowed to align Nigeria’s development path with that of the South American nation. The President was visibly hit by what he saw of the most industrialized and largest economy in Latin America, which by 2023 was ranked as the ninth largest economy in the world. Brazil’s nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is approximately $2.13trillion USD compared to Nigeria’s $243billion USD.
President Tinubu made the vow recently at a meeting with diaspora Nigerians in Brazil during his state visit to the emerging economic power house. He told his audience that his visit was a strategic move to deepen bilateral ties and draw inspiration from Brazil’s impressive development strategy. He added almost emotionally: “Once upon a time, Nigeria and Brazil stood on the same level. Look at Brazil today; its technology, its food systems…we must ask ourselves what do they have that we don’t?”
Freed from military dictatorship in 1986, just like Nigeria in 1999, Brazil’s new democratic order started building on the foundation of its predecessor for an economically strong country. Thus between 2002 and 2011, the country witnessed an unprecedented period of dizzying economic growth, which was put at a stunning 380 percent growth rate. The Brazilian government, it was said, knew what to do and did it, looking at the global economy. That was the magic that massively transformed the economy.
Brazil’s development model, according to sources, is characterized by its combination of inclusive growth, macroeconomic stabilization, innovative and well-articulated social policies like conditional cash transfer, and leveraging global commodity markets to achieve inclusive growth and reduce poverty and inequality. The country’s economic strength revolves around such key pillars as agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and services.
The country, for instance, has a diversified industrial sector, manufacturing automobiles, aircrafts, heavy machinery, steel and other industrial goods. Its vast natural resources and agricultural endowments provide the raw materials and products that are vital for the economy and export. The country is noted for massive cultivation of soyabean, coffee, sugarcane, beef (cattle) and poultry.
Reportedly, the Brazilian government had also made substantial infrastructural improvements covering roads, railways, waterways, power, sanitation and water in urban and rural areas for a more solid socioeconomic base. On account of its amazing economic growth and development, the country has for years been a member of the BRIC association, a body of emerging socioeconomic power houses. BRIC is an acronym that stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China.
We are gratified to note that President Tinubu has fallen in love with the Brazilian home-grown development model. The government designed the model and ensured that it was completely and exactly implemented without inhibitions or compromises to achieve the intended objective. This may have come with brutal sanctions for any attempt to derail the implementation of the grand scheme to achieve the projected development agenda.
A perusal of the Brazilian development magic is not too different from what Nigeria has in theory. In files gathering dust are brilliant policy papers detailing paths to accelerated socioeconomic development nationwide.
Over the last 26 years of the current democratic rule, there have been endless seminars and workshops on the way forward for a nation so endowed with a vast array of resources for development, but sadly development had stagnated because of man-made implementation failures.
We are not lacking, as a nation, the relevant literature for development or well-articulated models to make Nigeria great. Nigeria has massive agricultural land and awesome oil and mineral resources to drive development, all of them well documented.
The banes of Nigeria’s development, unfortunately, include corruption, bad governance, insecurity, mismanagement of resources and ethnic bigotry. These variables have hindered economic growth, discouraged investment, diverted resources, undermined the effectiveness of government initiatives, frustrated high caliber professionals and experts, and triggered the exodus of well sought-after personnel to foreign countries where they are more valued.
The problem of Nigeria really is not the development model to adopt, but to strategically and decisively deal with the country’s banes of accelerated growth and development. This is what President Tinubu must as a matter of necessity do to approximate the development status of Brazil.
He should work on the political class and the bureaucracy for a more positive attitudinal shift that would favour the kind of pragmatic development he envisions for the country. He should force the attitudinal and behavioral change, if necessary, with the aid of the legislative and judicial arms of government.
