Within the global development wave, urban renewal is seen as remedy to insecurity. Therefore

No abstract

Nigerian faces complex and mounting challenges of underdevelopment. However, this challenge could not have been so intimidating if negative socioeconomic, political and technological forces have also not combined to ensure the demise of her once bolstering 'night economy'. Contrary to the experience in the 70s when Nigerians worked and were moving 24 hours daily, the crowding out of 'night economy' and the growing culture of idleness have combined to dealt a great blow to the chances of Nigerian becoming a comparatively developed nation as some of the Asian tigers. With a retrospective case study of what then used to be Ikeja Industrial Estate, the two most destructive forces that have combined to retard Nigeria's progress are the trajectories of deindustrialization and demise of night economy both of which are serendipities of economic policy summersault that happened in the mid-80, to which subsequent heightened prevalence of insecurity have added the nodal norm of near complete social disorder. This paper, being product intuitive personal insights and area-specific field observation, argues that the only way to rapidly move Nigeria out of the doldrums of pervasive underdevelopment is to fast-track Nigerians back to work starting with rapid and massive facilitation of primary productive engagement. Towards achieving this, it recommends that government must simultaneously adopt pragmatic economic strategies of fiscal discipline, conspicuous interventionist posture to accelerate aggressive diversification, reindustrialization, state-enforced import substitution, selective outward orientation, and revival of her demised night economy.

Rational men support institutions that best guarantee the attainment of their socioeconomic aspirations. Of all known political rationalizations, democracy, it is that best prides such. However, in certain climes, there are inhibitive factors defiling the success of democracy, much of which is located within the state-economy relations. With a state-economy relations and democratic governance model, this paper comparatively, examined the trajectories of development in transiting societies in Asia and sub-Sahara Africa. It unveils that much of the failure at ensuring sustenance of democratic governance across transiting societies, in this case Nigeria, as compared with South Korea, stem from the contradictions arising from the interface between the state and the economy. With the Korean insight, despite regional peculiarities, it insists that efforts at reprofiling the state to ensure sustenance of democratic order should be premised on appropriate framework that captures the various indexes and promotes mutually reinforcing positive synergy between the state and the economy.

Politicking ranks the most lucrative preoccupation in sub-Sahara Africa generally, and Nigeria specifically. This logically derives from the central role of the state in socioeconomic processes. The public sector, by its size and share of the communal wealth, remains the most potent means of empowering nations for development. Reviewing 12 years of democratic rule in Nigeria, this paper examines the relationship between political earnings, capital flights and economic development with disappointing findings that the economic mix of political earnings constitutes a cog rather than being a catalyst of development in Nigeria. Identifying constitutional, societal and other systemic disincentives as major inhibitive factors, the paper advance measures by which local reinvestment of political earnings could be encouraged to contribute to current efforts at accelerated national development.