ROLE OF SMALL & MEDIUM SCALE ENTERPRISES IN THE NIGERIAN ECONOMY

There is no doubt that Nigeria as a nation, since attaining independence to 1960 has tried out various economic policies in a bid to achieve meaningful economic development. Most of these policies, one must say, are centrally planned and government dominated. The resultant impact of this excessive government domination of the economy left much to be desired leading to massive divestment in the 1990's by the government. This is done under the economic policy of “privatization and commercialization”. This shift emphasis thus created a challenge of building capable, dynamic and resourceful entrepreneurs to take the baton of economic revitalization from government. These entrepreneurs incidentally have to fulfill this onerous task through the establishment pf business that could mainly be classified as small and medium scale in nature. It is pertinent to add here that the aforementioned task is a difficult one for obvious reasons. For one, the dwindling state of the economy has made it difficult for people to save and thereby little capital accumulation for investment. Further our private sector is long undeveloped making experienced entrepreneur and small business managers scarce. There is a growing consensus among policy makers, academia, industrialist and economic planners, that the development of local entrepreneur and encouragement of the establishment of small and medium scale business is the only penance to our economic planners. The conclusion came as a result of over three decades of positioning government as the sole provider of all that makes life worth living, basic infrastructures, public utilities, good roads and services. Etc. It was discovered that the return for the huge investments made into it are gross inefficiency massive unemployment, dwindling foreign exchange earnings, epileptic supply of utilities etc. The foregoing led to the adoption of structural adjustment programme (SAP) and subsequent deregulation exercise. The later shifted it from government to private entrepreneurs who are expected to establish small and medium scale business as a more efficient substitute to providing the needed catalyst towards our economic engineering.