2020: The Year We Failed
There is this consensus that 2020 has been one of the worst years in history. But do we have the right to play the victims? The short answer is no. We victimized 2020 long before it turned out nasty. With the turn of events, this was meant to be the year of reckoning, a simple action, and reaction.
“By 2020 Nigeria will be one of the 20 largest economies in the world, able to consolidate its leadership role in Africa and establish itself as a significant player in the global economic and political arena”- that’s how it all started.
Nigeria among the 20 largest economies in the world- sounds like a dream right? That’s because it is and the people who peddled it didn’t even believe it. It all started when Goldman Sachs predicted that the Nigerian economy would be among the top 20 by 2025, but the then president, Olusegun Obasanjo had an even grander hallucination. He said that 2025 was too far; that Nigeria would achieve this goal by 2020, hence the phrase “vision 20:2020”. Special interest groups such as women, disabled people, media, labour, and youth were to be focused on as drivers of this vision.
Sure this plan looks good on paper but how did he intend on kick-starting it? Well, he invested $ 16 billion into failed power projects, bought Transcorp shares for himself, mismanaged oil revenue among other scandals. Surely, this would make the Nigerian economy the 20th largest economy in the world by 2020. So this trend was continued by subsequent governments over the years. When it finally got to 2020, it dawned on Nigerians that the vision was just a mirage.
Remember the six special interest groups mentioned earlier? They all became worse off. One in four girls in Nigeria had experienced sexual violence before the age of 18 according to UNICEF. The disabled people are not catered for; media rights are abused daily as journalists are killed and government clamps down on the media. Most of all, the youth who make up a significant number in Nigeria are highly uneducated and unemployed. You can say that the dream of 2020 was a nightmare.
But what if we had accomplished vision 2020?
Even if Nigeria had the 20th largest economy by 2020, Nigeria still wouldn’t be out of the woods just yet. The 20th largest economy wouldn’t mean shit because Nigeria would still be home to the largest population of extremely poor people in the world, third-lowest life expectancy rate (55 years), and 10 million out-of-school children. The reason being that the richest man in Nigeria earns about 150,000 times than the poorest 10% of Nigerians spend in a year according to the Oxfam 2019 inequality index.
The arrival of the year 2020 is simply a wakeup call from the dream of vision 2020 especially as the year came with a pandemic that shook the world health care sector so much that the political elite in Nigeria could not go for their medical tourism and had to rely on the dilapidated health system obtainable.
