An Audit on Globalization ? The Nigerian Perspective!

In the 1990’s, the UN development index rated Africa poorly in economy, health, education, feeding, clothing, human capital development, access to portable water, shelter, etc. The widening gulf between the global haves and have-nots was starkly revealed by the UN, which announced that while the US was booming in the 1990s more than 50 countries suffered falling living standards. This became the prolegomenon to Africa’s version of lost decades. The UN's annual human development report charted increasing poverty for more than a quarter of the world's countries, where a lethal combination of famine, HIV/Aids, conflict and failed economic policies have turned Africa truly black. Highlighting the setbacks endured by sub-Saharan Africa and the countries that emerged from the break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of the cold war,the UN called for urgent action to meet its millennium development goals by 2015. However, a major propeller that drives development remains governance. On this note, globalization was conceived to aid Africa in walking away from its seemingly perpetual backwardness. Despite some sporadic successes such as Ghana and Senegal, there was little hope of Africa meeting the UN's 2015 development goals; on current trends, it would be 2147 before the poorest countries in the poorest continent halved poverty and 2165 before child mortality was cut by two-thirds. Thirty of the 34 countries classified by the UN as "low human development" are in sub-Saharan Africa. Jingles of globalization arose in the quest for a New World Order, and to assist Africa from the dungeon of underdevelopment. The word globalization, as commonly used, is largely a descriptive and not an analytical category. This paper attempts to give the term analytic content. It then focuses on both the positive and normative analysis of globalization, its influence in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. Trade, investment, environment, finance, foreign aid, and gender issues receive special attention. A global governance structure based on transparent principles of both economic efficiency and social justice is shown to be a desirable state of affairs. Concomitantly, the present fractured process of globalization in Nigeria seems to expose our natural inclination and ineptitude to conceptualize development either in our local parlance or from borrowed perspectives. Contemporary Nigeria is run like a criminal corporation with complete erosion of structural development. This paper takes into account the dire need of raising hybrids from a desirable generation to salvage Africa from looming eclipse.