ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the economic reforms introduced after the Babangida regime came to power. They are the most important economic reforms in Nigeria since independence and the most comprehensive in Africa. The introduction of the Structural Adjustment Programme in 1986 marked a shift in economic policy towards a strategy that relied more on market forces and private enterprise to promote national accumulation. With the political unacceptability of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank took the lead in writing and working towards the introduction of a Structural Adjustment Programme that would prove acceptable to the IMF and the Nigerian government and open the way to rescheduling. The slow results of the programme, the deterioration in living standards, and the perception that the burden of the programme was highly unequal combined to fuel the opposition and meant that the government was not free to concentrate its energies on the transition to civil rule.
