A Review of Nigeria's Colonial and Post-Colonial Development Planning Paradigms and Experiences in Relation to China

The paper reviews Nigeria’s development planning journey relative to China’s, highlighting the superiority of endogenous development plans driven by internal visions, values, and capacities over externally driven economic strategies. The paper covers the colonial and post-colonial eras. While most of the colonial era was dominated by exogenous development planning, during the era of Self-Government (1954-1960), the regional governments adopted endogenous development planning, which significantly accelerated development. In the period 1969-1974, for the first time, the federal government adopted endogenous development planning culminating in Nigeria’s Second National Development Plan (1970-1974), which emphasized national sacrifice, unity, and collective ownership of the recovery process and assigned ownership and responsibility to drive the post-war economic planning to the government and all citizens. However, the 1975 military coup began a process of rolling back development planning, a process that was effectively ended when Nigeria began implementing the structural adjustment policies in 1986.While China transitioned to knowledge and innovation-driven economy and the second largest in the world, Nigeria remains a highly indebted resource-driven economy. The paper advocates a return to endogenous planning principles, reviving the communal, self-reliant ethos of the Second National Development Plan.