B ekeh U tietiang U kelina . The Second Colonial Occupation

Bekeh Utietiang Ukelina’s book The Second Colonial Occupation: Development Planning, Agriculture, and the Legacies of British Rule in Nigeria is a detailed investigation into the evolution of development planning in colonial Nigeria. The author asserts that until now, research on development in Africa has largely focused on the implementation and outcome of schemes in the postcolonial era, and this research attributes widespread failures to corrupt African leaders or local communities who resist innovation. Ukelina offers a different perspective by digging deep into colonial history in Nigeria to show how the seeds of development failures in the postcolonial era were in fact planted by colonial planners and administrators who forcefully imposed their modernizing ideologies and strategies. Building upon the work of Nigerian scholar Jeremiah Dibua, who identified development as a practice of Eurocentric diffusionism, Ukelina provides a historical account of development as another form of colonial conquest. The focus is the post–World War II era, when the British executed a major policy shift with regard to the overseas empire and began prioritizing investment in development as an integral part of colonial rule. Looking at this shift from the vantage point of local administrators, technical experts, and schemes in colonial Nigeria, Ukelina finds that despite the earnest efforts of officials to improve local circumstances, development was doomed by a lack of local participation in the planning process, insufficient funding, and poor planning. Thus, he concludes, the earliest failures of development planning were those seen under European rule, and the postcolonial crisis is a direct outgrowth of these failures.

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