Five years after Nigeria emerged from the stifling grip of military rule, the west African giant has finally launched an ambitious programme of economic reform, to the delight of international financial bodies, who see a chance to arrest the region's slide into poverty and unrest.
Within Nigeria, however, the plan has already run into powerful opposition from both organised labour and elements of the country's corrupt elite. Its backers will also face a tough challenge selling austerity measures to a sceptical and long-suffering population.
President Olusegun Obasanjo has put together a small team of reformists under Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former vice president of the World Bank, to trim Nigeria's bloated public sector and kick-start economic growth through investment in agriculture and basic infrastructure.
The development plan won rave reviews this week from the International Monetary Fund - whose inspection team described Obasanjo's endorsement of the plan as a "unique window of opportunity to carry out meaningful economic reforms" - and the World Bank.
"If you decide not to grab this moment it will be sad for Nigeria and for the whole of Africa," World Bank president James Wolfensohn told Nigerian reporters at an upbeat briefing in Abuja on Thursday.
"I think Nigeria is the most important element in what's going to happen in Africa," he said, calling on Nigerians to get behind the reforms despite the suffering and disappointment of two decades in which successive governments have looted the coffers, while the citizens of Africa's biggest oil exporter have sunk deeper into poverty.
Since 1980 per capita income has dropped from a 800 dollars (650 euros) per year to 280. Living standards have fallen steadily and the number of people living on less than one dollar per day has more than tripled, leaving more than 80 million people mired in abject poverty.
And while Nigerian troops have played an important role in stabilising wartorn west African neighbours Liberia and Sierra Leone, deprivation at home has exacerbated dozens of localised ethnic and sectarian conflicts, leaving more than 10,000 dead in clashes since 1999.
The five-year NEEDS plan is ambitious: Annual growth will have to reach seven percent by 2007 and inflation, currently growing, needs to fall from 14 to nine percent, while poverty levels must drop by five percent per year.
Oil will remain the mainstay of the economy, but agriculture - upon which more than half of Nigerians depend - is slated to grow by at least six percent per year. Nigeria hopes to earn three billion dollars per year from exporting its cassava crop.
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