Soft Choices in a Hard Environment: Meeting Post-Independence Governorship Challenges

Abstract

Commentators have wondered why Nigeria has largely failed to capitalize on its size and harness the energies of its people with a view to attaining the desired political and economic outcomes. Ever since the attainment of independence in October I960 and as evidence presented in chapters six and seven suggests, the country has wrestled with mounting socioeconomic and governorship challenges. Yet it has lagged where it was supposed to excel—witness its failure to channel its abundant human, natural, and mineral resources toward self-sustaining growth and improved living standards. When it should be hailed as an African giant or a potential tiger, its citizens are viewed as given to criminality, violence, and corruption at home, and are randomly profiled abroad as leaders in drug trafficking, “419” con artistry, the perpetration of internet fraud and of related scams.