FEATURED PAPER

Resolving the Seemingly Intractable Nigerian National Infrastructural Deficiencies

By. O. Chima Okereke, PhD

Nigeria and UK

Introduction

Successive Nigerian leaders were outspoken of their determination to develop our nation. At different times, they launched one development programme or the other in line with what they saw as the most urgent national problem. The programme by the current leader is the Vision 2020.  By this, it is planned that Nigeria should become one of the top twenty industrialised countries in the year 2020.

Investment in the building of our national infrastructure was one of the main planks of their strategy for economic development. This was true of both military and civilian leaders. There is no claim here that the plans were properly crafted and implemented. We cannot even claim that the right plans were developed at the right time for addressing the identified deficiencies. Nevertheless, they  made varying degrees of efforts to work for our infrastructural development. We shall touch on some of the national development programmes in this paper. These efforts notwithstanding, the nation remains saddled with underdeveloped infrastructure which constitutes the main drawback to our economic development.

Reasons for Infrastructural Deficiencies

In view of the continuing poor state of our infrastructure, some well meaning and highly placed national and international persons have blamed the long standing deficiencies on lack of investment by successive governments. These views are discussed further in this paper, but they may not be the whole story. For, there have always been budgets for capital expenditures, approved and supposedly implemented every year at the federal and state or regional level as the case might be, probably except for the years of the Civil War. More importantly, there were various development programmes launched by successive regimes.

However, we accept that inadequate investment could be a major contributory factor but not the only reason. Another factor could be wrongly planned and poorly executed projects. The necessity to identify as correctly as possible the reasons for our failures is to ensure that we can make efforts to cure the problems. For, unless we can correct our past errors, we run the risk of repeating them such that current efforts to resolve our infrastructural problems may not be effective. We shall remain beset with them and a few years from now, some commentators may suggest that the infrastructure has remained poor because of gross neglect and lack of investment even by the present national and state governments. Such a statement will not be correct even as the blame on past governments over neglect and lack of investment may be incorrect.

We would suggest that another reason for our failures could be due to investments on poorly identified, poorly planned, and poorly executed projects. All these qualifying phrases are pointers to the fact that our national project management methodology has not met our requirements.

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About the Author O. Chima Okereke, PhD, PMP Author Dr. O. Chima Okereke, Ph.D., MBA, PMP is the Managing Director of Total Technology Consultants, Ltd., based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria and in the UK.  He was previously a chief engineer for Delta Steel Company in Aladja; a project engineer/technical trainer  for Shell Petroleum Development Company in Warri; and Principal Engineer and Section Head for Instrumentation & Control in the National Electric Power Authority  Thermal Power Station, Sapele. .  Chima sponsored and founded the potential chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI®) in Port Harcourt, acting as president from 2003 to 2010.  Dr. Okereke has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Lagos, and a Ph.D. degree, and Masters in Business Administration (MBA) degree from the University of Bradford in the UK.  He also has a PMP certification.  With over 25 years of experience in industrial operations and project management, he has been a registered engineer with COREN in Nigeria since 1983.  Total Technology is a partner for Oracle Primavera Global Business Unit, a representative in Nigeria of Oracle University for training in Primavera project management courses, a Gold Level member of Oracle Partner Network (OPN) . In the UK, the company is also a member of the Herefordshire and Worcestershire Chamber of Commerce. More information can be found at http://www.totaltechnologyconsultants.org/.  Chima is also an International Correspondents for PM World Today and can be contacted at OkerekeOC@gmail.com and OkerekeOC@aol.com.