By Peter Osalor

At the administrative level, Nigeria needs radical changes in fiscal, monetary and industrial policies to both promote new enterprises and aid existing ones. The bulk of the problem is the impaired access for small and medium enterprises to capital markets.

To improve thAis situation, lawmakers have made it mandatory for commercial banks operating in Nigeria to keep aside 10 per cent of pre-tax profits for equity investment in small businesses.

While it was a reasonably sensible move, it failed to meet avowed targets because the rate of actual disbursement was significantly lower than expected. In the context of cultivating a wholesome entrepreneurial spirit, policy changes can often be superficial unless followed through with flexible implementation and constant monitoring.

An effective revamp of Nigerian financial policy initiatives must focus on three key objectives: Enhanced regulatory mechanisms to oversee micro-financing operations.

· Increased capacity and motivation for financial aid to small businesses.
· Improved coordination between various government, private sector and donor agencies.

Engineering a country-wide entrepreneurial spirit also calls for simultaneous and massive social restructuring, in a way that correctly reflects Nigeria’s historical imperatives and the poverty that blights both its urban and rural landscapes.

Even though the country earned an estimated $600 billion in oil revenue in the last half century, it’s GDP per capita of $1,418 ranks among the lowest in the world. Added to that are deep-set symptoms of rural illiteracy and gender inequality, both of which are proving acutely detrimental to sustainable enterprise development.

The Nigerian Economic Policy for 1999-2003 envisaged far reaching promises on universal basic education, adult literacy and a slew of related programmes aimed at leap-frogging in order to short circuit the longer span of development.”

Part of the reason these and other objectives have since been frustrated is the huge difference between policy and execution, a problem of developing nations in general. In Nigeria, it is a key concern area because of its close relation to another national catastrophe: rampant bureaucratic corruption.

The state of Nigerian corruption is so insidious that it comes with its own name – prebendalism, essentially defined as mass misappropriation of public assets by bureaucratic and political agents. International aid agencies owe much of the failure of Nigeria’s economic and poverty alleviation initiatives to an intractable bureaucracy that has steadily resisted efficient and fair practices.

Creating an aggregate socio-economic environment that is conducive to enterprise development in the fullest sense, through fiscal, monetary and industrial policy changes. Removing conditions that create high business costs by addressing systemic deficiencies in terms of infrastructure, policy and implementation.

· Attracting local private sector finance and equity with the specific objective of creating a mass base of viable small businesses.
· Revamping the education sector to provide vocational, administrative and skill development training to rural and urban youths.
· Maintaining political stability and building social consensus to ensure broad-based success of macroeconomic policies.

Entrepreneurship is not the problem of developing nations. They have plenty of entrepreneurs. When people in developing regions are provided with opportunity, they will likely start a business. For example, the streets are full of peddlers who exhibit entrepreneurial spirit and some people, when denied the opportunity to express it in the open market, will turn their focus to the black market.

This entrepreneurial spirit is prominent among developing nations because there is no work, and it becomes essential to come up with something to do in order to survive. In order to get out of the slums, creativity and the willingness to take risks is encouraged from a young age.

To summarise in two words, Nigeria’s future economic success depends on creativity and perseverance. The creative aspect is necessary to design locally applicable solutions for accelerated economic growth.

In view of its historical and current economic realities, these solutions will need continuous and flexible implementation with built-in course correction capabilities.

In short, intelligent perseverance! It is certainly not going to be an easy job bringing about and sustaining an entrepreneurial spirit in Nigerian affairs. But unless it manages to do just that, the chances of this remarkably talented country shaking off its Third World attributes and transforming into a global economic powerhouse are slim.