Infrastructure And Leadership: Corporatocracy, Indigenous Elites And Nigeria'S Under-Development

Most recent literature on social and economic infrastructure recognise the value of multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and IMF's involvements in offering advice or part-funding infrastructure in developing world. These analyses however neglect the underlying neo-liberal/ideological character of the interventions of these multilateral institutions as well as those of the multinational corporations fronting for them. In this article, the authors discussed the emergence of multinational construction corporations in Nigeria and their engagements in infrastructural development in the country; underlining the corporatocratic character of post-independence national development. The essential point of this article is that the post-independence infrastructural development trajectory in Nigeria may be understood in relation to the continuous subjugation of the nation to the global world economic hegemony with which all other poor/Third World Nations are confronted. The article argues that through the incorporation of Nigeria into the World Capitalist System, her sociostructural arrangement is delineated into a top-bottom approach to infrastructural development. Hence, infrastructure is today regarded as the only way to develop and, consequently, as indices to measure how successful/progressing the nation is. Finally, the article presented two cases of Julius Berger and Sonel-Boneh to exemplify the nuances of infrastructure as development, thus showing how the structure (leadership/ownership) of these corporations represent the ideological directions of their homelands with grave consequence for indigenous national development.