For Nigeria to experience economic turnaround

A review of Professor Wale Oyemakinde’s book, A Turning Point: Where and When History Itself Turns.

PROFESSOR Wale Oyemakinde, a retired professor of Economic History, in this book, A Turning Point: Where and When History Itself Turns, highlights how industrialised countries of the world made an economic turn-around, and why Nigeria should also emulate such countries.

Although published in 2011 by Sunlight Institute for Policy Studies, Ibadan, Oyo State, Professor Oyemakinde goes back to the era when NITEL used to dominate the telecommunication sector in the country, and how the GSM revolution connected Nigerians with the outside world.

This, the don, admits is a turning point for the telecommunication sector in the country when only the rich and powerful could access telephones.

He also highlights how Britain and other Western nations were able to achieve their industrial revolution, which brought with it prosperity, adding that citizens of these countries now have more job opportunities, which the gap between Potential Gross Domestic Product (PGDP) and the Actual Gross Domestic Product (AGDP) had drastically been reduced.

He says: “By far, more people got engaged in the production of goods and services such that abundant wealth got created and the national cake came to be as large as possible.

“That turning point when and where history turned for Britain and subsequently for the rest of the industrialised world is what Nigeria should strive to achieve and show the way for other African countries to follow if hunger and abject poverty would not condemn one African state after another to the club of failed states ready for recolonisation.”

However, to achieve that turning point, Professor Oyemakinde says it is far from advocating the creation of white-collar jobs, “Rather, we are talking of wealth creation in the context of employment generation for tangible production that would lead to multiplication of utilities.

“The emphasis must be on agricultural industry involving farming in all its ramifications and agro-allied industrialisation that would transform the participants and the totality of the environment of their operation.

“Goods and services would subsequently be produced in super abundance and the wealth of the nation would multiply sumptuously, such that poverty and penury would give way to prosperity and opulence.”

Professor Oyemakinde’s book is recommended to the Federal, state and local governments, members of the political class and students of economics in various tertiary institutions in the country.

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