Author Description

This is the edited diary of one of the first Western economists to serve as an adviser in the government of an independent African country. It gives a brutally frank appraisal of Nigeria's then political leaders and the economists, local and foreign, who sought to shape the country's development policies and to write its first Five-Year Development Plan. It anticipates many of the problems that afflicted Nigeria from the mid 1960s on, highlighting statist interference in the economy, corruption and the waste of development resources.