The Desk — Finance, Policy & the View from the Street By Kemi Adeosun
Two conversations that explain why development keeps failing to arrive. First of two parts.
I have spent the last few months on the Nidacity podcast, travelling up and down the country, sitting across from the people who actually build things here. It has been the best economic education of my professional life — and I say that as someone who has run a state treasury and a federal one.
What I have learned is too large for one sitting, so I am doing something I rarely do: writing in two parts. This week, the evidence — two conversations that dismantled things I thought I knew about how development actually arrives. Next week, the argument — what that evidence demands of policy, which tier of government should deliver it, and the nations that have already proved the model works.
Let me start with the question that follows me from conversation to conversation: why do so many well-intentioned government initiatives fail to deliver? I can already hear the answers being shouted at the page. Corruption. Cluelessness. The easy words that are thrown around, making us feel simultaneously helpless and vindicated. Whilst not always wrong, they are rarely the whole explanation, and they have a convenient property: they require nothing of us analytically. Blame the character of officials and you never have to examine the architecture they operate within.
