Strategic Management for Economic Emergence in African Countries: Constitutive Strategies in Nigeria’s Vision 20:2020 as Exemplars

Résumé

Positioning strategy-making as a learning process and taking a learning theory perspective, we examined the constitutive strategies in Nigeria‟s Vision 20: 2020 with the main objective of extracting lessons that Nigeria can share with other African countries in the spirit of a “learning continent” whose States should be learning together, learning from one another, and learning by doing. From this examination, it was found that Nigeria moved from rhetoric to implementation of its developmental vision (N20:2020) with the first implementation plan running from 2010 to 2013. In 2015, it attained the 26th position among the largest economies in the world. Nigeria also attained the largest economy in Africa climbing from a low ranking among 200 comparator countries in 1999 on many development indices. It was also found that Nigeria achieved consensus among stakeholders for pursuing socioeconomic development through the platforms of the Nigerian Economic Summit and the Nigerian Employers‟ Consultative Association. The synergistic structuring of the strategies is noteworthy in the way human capital development is designed to drive a knowledge-based economy, which in turn drives entrepreneurship, which finally drives the rest of the economy. The stance in this paper is whether, in the face of things, Nigeria appears to have been “doing the right thing”. Future researchers should make a comparative study of the strategies of other African States from a strategic choice theory perspective.