2. Development planning

Development planning grew out of several ideas of the late 1940s and 1950s, and came from a number of different economic contexts. First, the notion of “development” itself was a largely post WWII idea indicating economic changes in structure or “modernization,” as distinct from merely economic growth. Second, “planning”: the idea that an economy not only could, but should be managed towards a better path, namely that the government had a positive rather than defensive responsibility towards the economy, might be understood as a fall-out from the economic dislocations and crises of the interwar period. Third, the planning experiences within the warring countries of WWII proved that economies could be successfully reorganized to achieve certain aims. Finally, the relatively speedy reconstruction of war-torn economies following the war perhaps suggested that other economies, including those that were judged “underdeveloped,” could—through planning—reach a better position rather quickly and effectively.

Yet not all planning was focused on development. Most planning at that time lay somewhere between the three extremes of the Eastern bloc’s central planning (controlled production via controls on capital, labor and organization of work with output targets); French “indicative” planning (that depended on capitalist producers understanding and voluntarily following state targets); and the simpler forms of public expenditure planning. The point is that, at this time, “planning” was a broadly accepted term for all kinds of active, technocratic government engagement to improve the national economy.

“Development planning” reflected a specific target of these various planning modes and aims. Yet what “development” meant was still not entirely clear in this period, and those who have tried to make sense of this tangled episode in the history of economics have pointed to the radical shifts over time in the fashionable recipes for development, and to different ideological views that informed different planning ideals.Footnote ⁵ There was a wealth of ideas and arguments about how to go about planning development. A UN expert report from 1951 offered an analysis of the contemporary approaches, their techniques, and the priorities and difficulties of planning. Questions of the time ranged over the role of the state vs the market; over the use of investment in capital projects vs macro management vs input-output planning; over the role of domestic vs international resources; and over the relative ordering and speed of developmental policies. Different international institutions, research centers and individual economists each had their own preferred way of going about planning, for there was no universally agreed-upon recipe for development or, perhaps, none that was applicable in exactly the same way everywhere. For, of course, each country was very different from the next, and the problem of reconstruction of Europe was not the same problem as developing the countries of Africa, which in turn were not those of Asia.Footnote ⁶ This variety of questions and experience was used to buttress arguments about different kinds of planning, which spilled into the Nigerian planning process.

While the definition of what constitutes a developed economy remained vague, the development literature of the 1950s seems to have had less of a problem defining “un- or under-development.” Moreover, there was a very widely and strongly-held belief amongst economists, governments and international agencies in the 1960s and 70s that such underdeveloped countries could indeed become better off by making use of various forms of economic intervention and direction (see Morgan and Bach, Reference Morgan and Bach2018). And, while this optimism now seems misplaced, the contemporary actors’ terminology of “on a mission” captures both the faith that poor and underdeveloped economies could become rich, modernized ones, and that the planners, as “economic missionaries,” could be instrumental in creating this conversion.

As we will see, there were many optimistic planners in this planning project, and while there were plenty of ambitions within Nigeria, many of those “on a mission” to plan the economy came from outside Nigeria. Unlike Stolper, they were usually on short investigative trips, more like military sorties than his long-term resident commitment. This was after all the Cold War, a political ideological war in which economic beliefs and realities were an integral part of the different allegiances. In the late 1940s through the 1960s, as the old European powers withdrew from Africa, the new superpowers helped to reconstruct those old economies in order to grow new economies in their own image. Client states replaced colonial states where new allegiances were recognized by their economic stance as much as their political one. In this context, missions from the Western regimes (and associated international agencies) saw their development task as one of creating a stable political economy in order that Nigeria would form a strong western-oriented nation in a non-socialist Africa.Footnote ⁷ It is one of the ironic paradoxes of the cold war era that it was thought that an economy such as Nigeria’s had to be “planned” to keep it safe for the “free market” of capitalism and the free politics of democracy (Morgan Reference Morgan2003). But those newly independent states knew how to play this game; they were very smart in using the Cold War to their advantage in seeking funds from both sides, sending their own “reverse missions” to both Eastern and Western powers to gain donations for their projects.

The “de-colonizing” agenda was often—on both sides—more of a political economy agenda than an economic developmental one: the old colonial powers wanted to cut off their dependencies, and the ex-colonies wanted to forge their own path (Cooper, Reference Cooper, Cooper and Packard1997). Rather than making a wholesale change to the nature of the economy, this might mean just reducing economic dependence on the previous colonial state as the main economic partner in trade, and perhaps even adopting an “import-industry substitution” recipe, as some of the Latin American countries did. But while some African ex-colonies toyed with the notion of an “African socialism” (perhaps following Eastern European models, such as Ghana under Nkrumah or Kenya under Kenyatta), the possibilities of regional groupings, and even pan-Africanism, seemed more alluring (Speich Reference Speich2009; Getachew Reference Getachew2019). In practice, most development planning in African new states was either project planning (funding individual investment projects, often from outside international agency donor income), or the more technocratic national-expenditure-based planning based on national accounting systems. For Nigeria, it was the latter.

3. Our “missionary” and his “mission”

Wolfgang F. Stolper was born in 1912 in Vienna, Austria and died in 2001 in Ann Arbor, USA.Footnote ⁸ He began his education in Berlin and Bonn in the early 1930s and completed it at Harvard. He joined the University of Michigan in 1949, and developed a distinguished academic career. He enjoyed a parallel career as an economist undertaking “missions,” journeys of economic investigation, analysis, oversight and program design for bodies such as USAID, the UN, and the IBRD/World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development).Footnote ⁹ The path to these activities had begun in the late 1940s with a summer job at the ILO (International Labor Organization) reporting on economic development in Asia, and then, in the late 1950s, the construction of national income figures as a way to analyze the structure and development of the East German economy under planning for MIT’s Center for International Studies.Footnote ¹⁰ The MIT center also sponsored his first connection to Africa, namely a research trip—to Europe—gathering information from colonial authorities and European Africanists. Thus, Stolper’s Nigerian adventure was both his first direct experience of Africa and his first planning mission.Footnote ¹¹

When Stolper, a middle-aged German/American economist, arrived in Nigeria on July 17^th 1960, a few months prior to its independence after many decades of British colonialism, he faced the challenging, even Herculean, task, of constructing a five-year “national development plan” for the newly independent country. Although the Economic Planning Unit of which he was (administrative, not political) head, was funded by the Ford Foundation, he was nevertheless not an expatriate advisor, but a civil servant, and his unit was an element in the relatively newly created Nigerian Federal Ministry of Economic Development. Nigeria at that time was a federal state of about 35-40 million people in a country of four distinct geographical/climatic regions—spanning swamps, rain forest, and savannah to near desert. Members of this population, the largest in an African country at that time, came from several main “tribal/ethnic” groups (and very many smaller ones), practiced several of the main religions (and fostered many smaller sects), and spoke as many languages. As Stolper soon learned, the new nation state of Nigeria was not one constitutional entity, but several: there were three autonomously governed regions, with their own tribal, ethnic and religious mixes, which were socially and economically distinct. His base was the federal capital, Lagos, a port city based on island/reclaimed land in the hot, humid coastal zone, and physically located within the Western region of the country. English was—luckily for him—an unofficial language shared amongst the “establishments”: the educated elites of political, state and economic power.

Stolper left his post on June 3^rd 1962, a two-year period of service with one long break (between September 1960 and February 1961 for some pre-committed teaching). As we shall see, his task was a very considerable indeed. But as we shall also find, his commitment proved equal to his mission—a mission not to develop the Nigerian economy, but to create a plan for its development. And to create that plan, he had to create, locally on the ground, a technocratic process of planning that incorporated both local economic and political interests across the regions.

4. The technocratic challenges

As the 1951 UN report emphasized, the first thing to do in planning is to figure out where you are now: the starting point. The Nigerians were keen to refashion their economy, but of course, that economy was not a blank slate. Ideally, a planner needs to know all the economic resources of the nation: its land (and its qualities), its population, its capital and financial resources and their qualities, the main productive sectors in the economy and their products (e.g., farming and manufacturing). Planners need to know also the distribution of all these things: where the skilled workers are and what skills they have, where the fertile land is, and where the climate makes life difficult (e.g., where the Tse-Tse fly thrives and so cattle do not). They need to be able to figure out the likely growth rates of those resources and their likely price changes (particularly for critical exports of cocoa and ground nuts). They also need to know the aggregate possibilities of the economy in terms of savings, investments, consumption, exports and imports, the expenditure and income of the state and its monetary policy. And so forth and so on.

What did these Nigerian planners know of their existing economy in respect of all these elements in 1960? There had been requirements for a ten-year plan under the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts of 1945–57, and a number of data gathering and planning efforts had begun in the 1950s.Footnote ¹² Most significantly, as a joint initiative of the British Colonial Office, the (colonial) Nigerian Government and the Colonial Economic Research Committee, “national income accounts” had been constructed for the economy for 1950/51. (This huge data gathering task involved aggregate accounts for the whole economy on production, income, and expenditure by category.) This had established not only the first such accounts for the nation, but some conventions for counting and valuing non-market economic activities in the country.Footnote ¹³ There had also been a population census of 1952/3, and a wide data gathering exercise in 1953 for a development program produced by a mission of the IBRD/World Bank that had visited the country for two months in 1953 (IBRD 1955).Footnote ¹⁴ More recent information was available in the Economic Survey of Nigeria of 1959, an initiative of Charles Thompson (the head civil servant in the Ministry that Stolper joined) which brought together all the available statistical evidence (and some map evidence) about Nigeria’s economy, up to about 1957 or 1958.Footnote ¹⁵ At the same time, E.F. Jackson and Pius Okigbo had been constructing national income accounts for the Nigerian economy to fill in the period 1950–7 and these became available to the planning team in typescript at a certain point.Footnote ¹⁶ The importance of these latter national income accounts was that, taken together with the earlier estimates for 1950/51, they could be used to establish aggregate growth rates, and in a consistent way. These data were therefore an important complement to the freely measured growth rates of various economic particulars such as the outputs of minerals or cocoa, or the patterns of exports and imports, as found in the tables of the 1955 IBRD report or the Economic Survey of 1959.

It was on the basis of all these data that Stolper’s optimism about the future of Nigeria was based, for they suggested strong economic growth (around 4% p.a. in GDP or growth domestic product), an increase in capital investment, particularly social overhead investments, a healthy population growth, and a good resource basis, including the new discovery of oil reserves (Stolper 1963, 169, 172). But because of this healthy growth, much of the information obtained in the early 1950s, and even the more recent data for 1957, was of course quite out of date by the time Stolper arrived. More seriously, many data series considered crucial for planning were missing, as was standard for developing countries in this period.Footnote ¹⁷ And this was a decentralized country: apart from the Federal Government’s economics and statistics teams, each of the autonomous regions had its own bureaucracy, which acted as a separate body of hunters and gatherers of economic data and formed separate centers of calculation. These three regions had different colonial legacies, different political power bases, and different degrees of economic development. According to Stolper’s judgement, the Western region had the most effective degree of economic data collection and economic knowledge, followed by the Eastern region and then the Northern. And if data were not missing, their accuracy was mostly doubtful. For example, a well-designed agricultural survey was conducted by the rather effective Western region, but even they rated much of the data they collected as being inaccurate by as much as 15% above or below the true levels, and some as being an unfortunate 50% above or below the true level!Footnote ¹⁸

So, if we look at Nigerian planning as a process where the departure point was known, the aim was a defined and shared one, and there were known ways to get from here to there, we have the wrong impression. As Stolper wrote in the immediate aftermath of his planning experience: “Much of development theory proceeds … on such assumptions as that the future is known and that the existing starting point is well defined. The practitioner, by contrast, very quickly finds himself afloat in a sea of uncertainties” (Stolper Reference Stolper1966, 3–4). There are several other important contemporary resources in which he reflected upon his work in Nigeria. In April 1962, he discussed some dimensions of the plan at a meeting of the Nigerian Economic Society (see Stolper Reference Stolper1962 and the discussions that follow).Footnote ¹⁹ In February 1963, he was asked to contribute a paper on his experiences to the general science monthly Scientific American, who compiled a special issue on economic planning; and he published two other papers on his experiences.Footnote ²⁰ Finally, his Planning without Facts (Reference Stolper1966)—a stark title—revealed his Nigerian experience for a professional audience. At every level, these resources reveal that Stolper’s view of planning was a pragmatic one: his calculations were based on poor quality numbers and had to take account of missing ones. And they also reveal the extent to which he worked by “feeling his way forward.” When he arrived in Nigeria, he was not quite sure how to undertake his planning task, as we see in an early memo he wrote for the Joint Planning Committee of the National Economic Council five weeks after his arrival in late August 1960. Here he set out a shopping list of things to be measured, things he hoped he would find, things that he hoped different Federal and regional offices might supply, and how he thought of putting these together.Footnote ²¹ He gradually proceeded to gather, with many difficulties, the information he needed, and to develop his planning process.

5. Planning Nigeria’s development through Stolper’s eyes: The technocratic practice

We can see all these planning questions and planning process through Stolper’s eyes, in the diary he wrote every few days and sent home to his wife; and his archive of personal papers holds many other items from his two years as a Nigerian civil servant.

Maybe Stolper was surprised by how little was already known in the form of economic data about the Nigerian economy, and maybe not. He soon set about filling in his own large information gap. He took every opportunity he could to travel through the regions to look carefully at the arrangements and qualities of fields, farms, factories, mines and fisheries. He did not just observe, but asked everyone he met on his travels around the regions: farmers, businessmen, traders, etc. about their economy. His diaries show how he raised points about his observations and experience one day, answering himself a couple of days later when he had found out the reasons. He drew also on his personal experience in the Nigerian economy when attempting to get curtains made for his apartment, trying to get travel arrangements or rest-house reservations made, and—most memorably—attempting to organize the safe delivery of a grand piano that arrived in the pouring rain (for his leisure hours, such as they were, were spent in playing this instrument and listening to classical music records).Footnote ²²

From his diary, we also learn that as well as making his own observations, he sent out requests for information to the central bank, other federal government departments, the statistics office, and the equivalent bureaus in the three autonomous regions. His requests sometimes grew into projects for those offices to gather new information, to sort it, to calculate things, and send them to Stolper, for his planning depended upon the bureaucracies of all the regions, as well as the central state, to produce economic facts and circulate them back to him.

It was far from easy to persuade all these other people not only that they should gather such information but that they should share it with him. This involved trips to the regional capitals, detailed discussions with officials as to what data to collect and how to collect it, working meetings analyzing the data and so forth. He had to cajole and sometimes threaten to get his data. For example, his attempts to get information out of the federal statistics office began with polite requests to an equivalent level civil servant, but then involved a series of follow-up visits to that office and necessitated arguments about why such data were needed in such haste and such a form. These, in turn, were followed by requests via senior levels, and—eventually—by his sending his most junior planning office member to look at the statistics in their filing cabinets and negotiate with a similarly junior-level staffer for permission to borrow those files for the planning unit to work on! (Diary Reference Gray2003, 67, 72–4).

Planning was Stolper’s responsibility as head of the Planning Unit, but he did not start from a preformed plan. He believed that planning ought to increase individual wellbeing, but he had no pre-specified set of targets, let alone a blueprint based on some standard recipe or development theory that had to be followed rigidly (see his 1962). Nor, for him, was planning simply a schedule of capital projects funded by international aid or governmental expenditure. Rather, Stolper’s aim was to create a plan that would move the economy towards self-sustaining growth: this meant looking for steps that could increase the usefulness of the resources of the economy and were within the overall capacity of the economy.

His basic approach was collaborative rather than dictatorial, and so he started with the wider Nigerian economic polity, seeking out their preferred elements of the plan. In this context, Stolper expressed admiration for Tinbergen’s decentralized view of planning, shaped by the latter’s experience of planning the post-war reconstruction of the Dutch economy, and by the traditions of Dutch society in which not just different political and state officials, but different social and economic groups, participated in decision making.Footnote ²³ Stolper therefore asked the Nigerian democratic representatives, both federal and regional, what economic activities they wanted to develop and invest in. He consulted grassroots, middle managers and entrepreneurs to see what investment and activities were feasible, both what could be done in terms of physical resources, and in terms of available skills including capacity to manage and execute projects.

But he also checked up on their claims, asking, for example: Why would someone want to build a beer-bottle factory in a sparsely populated area of the Northern territory which was predominantly Muslim? Or, can you build a profit-making slaughterhouse in this area which is away from the main population centers? One of the research trips (recorded in his diary), to Lake Chad enabled him to learn firsthand about the problems of the fishing industry and local agriculture, and showed this twofold aspect of gathering local facts and pinpointing local potential activities for development at the same time. He reported the lesson in his Scientific American article: “We thought it absurd in any case for a man sitting in Lagos or any of the regional capitals to pretend to know in sufficient detail such matters as the agricultural problems in the Lake Chad area. We therefore emphasized development of the planning framework from below and the decentralization of decision-making in the execution of the plan” (Stolper 1963, 178).

The first important technocratic process involved analyzing these proposed projects sent in by the regions. After collecting all the information he could find about a particular project suggested by his consultations with private or public sector economic actors, he set out to calculate a “payoff” measurement: a kind of cost-benefit analysis both in real terms and in monetary terms, to see if that project seemed viable (Diary Reference Gray2003, 242, 274).Footnote ²⁴ These kinds of technical calculation were where his economic science came in: knowing not just how to measure things, or to value difficult things that were not already valued, but how to figure out what each activity would cost in real terms to the economy over the forthcoming time period, and how it would benefit which part of the economy and when. Thus, an Israeli-designed scheme to set up farm settlements for training farmers sounded wonderful, but the number of young men it would train was so small that the cost per person and per farm turned out to be very expensive, and not economically viable. This calculation regime enabled him to assess the coherence of each of the proposed suggested activities and to rank these in terms of viability of achievement and usefulness for the future of the economy. All this depended upon the information he gathered in the field and through the various contacts and offices about the likely costs and benefits, which provided answers to a multitude of prosaic and often technical questions such as: just how much ground nut oil could be pressed from a new machine of a particular design, and how far would profits from it depend upon the prices that might be paid?

The second important technocratic step where planning required his economic expertise was in putting all these individual elements together into an overall plan, which involved a broad examination of the existing economy’s overall constraints. The coherence of the overall plan depended upon the fit of the set of economic activities and investments proposed by the democratic representatives with the likely aggregate resources of the economy over the intended five years of the plan. This is where Stolper claimed the usefulness, indeed necessity, of using a measuring framework which depended on a structural understanding of the aggregate whole: “It is easy enough to produce optimistic projections and make things come out right,” he argued, “but the real function of an aggregative framework is to allow one to test the consistency of individual decisions. Only if individual decisions can be linked to each other and to the aggregations are the aggregations a legitimate tool of planning” (Stolper Reference Stolper1966, 15). Using this aggregative framework denied that one could simply plan development as a series of individual projects (“project planning”), and also denied that it was a simple question of government expenditure planning. Rather it entailed an assessment—in terms of Nigeria’s resources and potentials of the people, places, and available funds—that entailed sophisticated and complicated calculation using the conceptual accounting framework that came along with macroeconomic theory and its measurement system, namely, National Income Accounting.Footnote ²⁵ Stolper thought this a matter requiring not only his greater understanding of theory and expertise (compared to others in the planning team) but his imagination: “I work, for a theorist, with imagination—not intuition, but just imagination. I have the ability of being able to extract a maximum of information from scanty data, but this requires the painstaking study of detail. Lyle and Peter [his junior American colleagues] don’t quite understand yet, how the detail is used in a general context” (Diary Reference Gray2003, 141–2).

Imagination was needed not just because of missing information but because of the uncertainty of plans. But imagination was constrained by the necessity that the elements had to fit in with the sophisticated aggregate accounting framework that economists used to understand how the parts of an economy fitted into and worked together in making the whole economy function. What did this accounting framework mean in practice? In creating the aggregate plan, Stolper insisted on examining the consistency of the plan in four different respects: (1) the consistency of all these activities with each other; (2) their consistency with the overall resources and capacities of economy; (3) their consistency in both physical and monetary terms, and (4) their consistency with the likely changes in these capacities over the forthcoming period. It was not sufficient that the bits of the plan fitted together, and that the plan fitted into the macro-constraints of the national income accounts. Attention also needed to be paid to the ratios of capital to recurrent spending and recurrent physical capacities in these aggregates and over the time length of the plan. It was no good, Stolper argued as an example, to undertake lots of capital spending on schools, or even to be given funds to build hospitals from an aid donor, if you could not then afford the current expenditure to keep them running and had not sufficient trained teachers, doctors and nurses to staff them.Footnote ²⁶ This was a problem of real resources in the economy, not to be solved by simply printing more money—which does not create doctors or teachers, or physical capital!Footnote ²⁷ This sounds a simple point, but none of these activities could be considered in isolation, and the necessary extent of the consistency checks was not immediately obvious to others in the planning process.

His overall analysis, based on fitting the elements together and making sure consistency and balance would be attained, suggested that “Nigeria’s five-year plan” should avoid ambitious capital projects, should go slow on immediate social overhead investment, and should aim instead for immediately productive investment—for example in energy or agricultural productivity. This investment could then generate regular income to fund other recurrent expenditures, for example, the future funding of schools and hospitals (Diary Reference Gray2003, 81). This was not so much a surprising or ambitious dream for developing a new nation, but a down-to-earth plan based the extremely detailed calculations of the technocratic procedures.

And, as if all this valuing of elements, calculating of the whole, and consistency creation was not enough to keep him busy all hours of the day and much of the night, Stolper was always on the lookout for the dangers that came from being a “new state” with new rulers, and from the intersection of political and personal gains.Footnote ²⁸ Such dangers were multiple. Stolper was too late on the scene to influence decisions about the Niger Dam project, but the economic costs and benefits of its various elements, and the political importance of this North-South project, were for him a continuing and worrying item in the planning process. He thought a more serious danger were those projects which he believed had no obvious economic benefit but were just very expensive symbols of statehood: for example, a new national (or possibly shared West African) commercial airline service (Diary Reference Gray2003, 75, 147, 153).Footnote ²⁹ This was a project of which he was extremely wary, believing that jets for commercial use would engender the desire for an air force, an even more expensive luxury.

Even as he sought to avoid the dangers of overspending Stolper was equally anxious to avoid a plan that would involve great underspending. He expected underspending during the early years of the plan, apparently because in this kind of environment, projects chosen for support turn out to be not immediately viable (despite all his efforts at ensuring their viability before he stitched them into the plan), or simply not ready for their planned slot in the timetable.Footnote ³⁰ A certain amount of underspending was not only expected but desirable, as it allowed the plan to retain flexibility to allow other elements to come in or to cope with unexpected cost increases, or failures of forecast returns. But a large underspend would call the plan into question, reducing public and political support and so, ultimately, economic control.

6. The political economy in planning circles

As the date of delivery for the plan became more urgent, Stolper’s diary entries show the intensity of his work and emotional involvement, as he became ever more obsessed with his planning mission. The historian reading his account does not only come to see planning through his eyes, but finds her own eyes drawn to the unusual display of detail in his account, which reveals the political economy of the whole planning project and how his technologies of valuing and splicing elements together relied on creating relations of trust in a decentralized process.

That “all economics is political” is a statement that is easy to make, and to believe in this case: for all planning decisions are about the use of resources. But how exactly did this political dimension play out in such an economic planning process? First we need to know something of the structure of the planning process. Here, it is important that there was not one single center of planning, where technocrats sat hunched over their calculators, crunching numbers in isolation from both politicians and economy alike, planning the ideal economic path to development without regard to the world outside. Nothing could be further from the truth of this case. Stolper was indeed head of a small technocracy in his planning unit, but there the accuracy of description ends. He acted at the center not just of one circle of calculation, but of many concentric rings within which political power and economic calculation could not be easily separated (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Stolper’s planning circles.

This arrangement stands in some contrast to Latour’s concept of “Centers of Calculation” in sciences (including social sciences and statistics), where their role, and their information domains, are pictured as working according to a centralizing tendency (Reference Latour1987, 232–57). While Stolper was indeed at the center, the circles that surrounded him reveal a decentralized technology of planning that proved critical in the Nigerian planning process: First there were the everyday working circles of all those involved in different planning teams in Nigeria. Then there was the fact that those actors kept changing as they cycled round onto other tasks. Finally, there was the constant stream of visiting missionaries circulating through Nigeria from overseas. We find the political present in every detail of his daily accounts of working through these various planning circles.

Stolper’s immediate planning team consisted of two other Americans and several Nigerians. This was his home domain, his own circle of information and calculation, which offered the usual kinds of tensions and differences of opinion between colleagues working closely together under immense time pressure, but without control over the inputs of information they needed or how the outputs would be used by their political masters. Although he was responsible for the plan to his Minister of Economic Development and to his Permanent Secretary (the chief civil servant in the ministry), he also had to interact closely with Narayan Prasad, the Indian “Economic Advisor” to the Prime Minister, who was not responsible for planning but for giving economic advice at a higher political level than Stolper. Prasad also chaired the JPC (Joint Planning Committee) to which Stolper reported, so that this was an important axis within this circle, and was far more difficult than any other work relationship because they had such different recipes for economic development, as we will see later.

In addition to this immediate circle, Stolper’s decentralized planning ideals meant that his group worked with federal civil servants across different ministries, the federal politicians in those ministries, and the parallel set of such civil servants and politicians at each of the three regional government levels. Recall that these relations were important for the acquisition of data about the existing capacities of the economy and its possibilities for development or growth. But he also had to get information from them about the projects that each of the different ministries and different regions wanted to undertake within the five-year plan. Much of the information that the planning unit needed was not even in these government circles, but had to be gained from those in the agricultural marketing boards, the port authorities, industrialists, farmers and other economic actors. Yet all these can still be thought of as part of the wider Nigerian planning circle—a set of other teams with which Stolper’s planning team interacted.

As if this was not complicated enough, the people involved in these intermediate and wider circles were forever changing, as the Nigeria bureaucracy underwent a process of “Nigerianization.” The British civil servants were being replaced by Nigerian ones, and it was part of the career path (inherited from the colonial administration) that civil servants regularly rotated from one job to another. As a result, Stolper worked with three “permanent secretaries” (these first two civil service heads in the ministry were British: Charles Thompson and Toby Lewis, and the third, a Nigerian, Godfrey Lardner, who had worked on the original national income accounts with Prest and Stewart), and with three different ministers (Alhaji Shagari, Jaja Wachuku and Waziji Ibrahim) during his two-year stint, as people moved around or up the system. The same process of Nigerianization and political movement was happening in each of the regional government levels. And in the midst of all this changing of personalities, Nigeria was also experiencing a jostling for power between the regions, and between the regions and the federal level.Footnote ³¹

Stolper had to persuade each new minister, and each new civil servant, not just in his ministry but in all the other ministries and in each region, into relations of trust in order to gain their collaboration and thus get data, to elicit their preferences for projects, and to gain their agreement with his technocratic assessment of those projects. That is, he had to bring them into his whole way of thinking about planning and the plan’s content. The technocratic process depended upon, and was itself, a social process:

A third planning circle was created by the remarkable number of visits from “Cold War” missionaries circulating through Nigeria. Such international missions during his period included visitations from official government and international agencies such as the FAO, IBRD/World Bank, IMF, ICA/USAID and other US groupsFootnote ³³ ; from commercial interests with aid links from places such as Germany and Switzerland, and technical aid from other interested parties, such as the Ford Foundation, and so forth. All these missions wanted to “help” Nigeria on its way, but they had different interests and different requirements, asked for different kinds of information and required different kinds of persuasion, and had the potential to offer different sorts of “development aid.” Unlike the three kings bearing gifts, those offering aid to the new state first preferred to check that their proposed gifts were likely to be well used (though donor-recipient commitments were not always explicit in the client states in this earlier period). These missions to Nigeria were, as mentioned earlier, even matched by a “reverse mission”: a group of politicians and senior civil servants sent from Nigeria in the summer of 1961 on an “Economic Mission” that travelled to both superpowers, their satellites, and the international agencies in order to gather promises of aid, sometimes for particular projects, sometimes for technical assistance. All these missions had a strong purpose, but they differed in those purposes. Some remained mysterious: for example, the International Atomic Agency Commission ostensibly arrived on a mission to help the Northern region with its development plans, but just what did it want? Was it looking for uranium perhaps? Less onerous, but still significant, were the visits of students and professors. These visits were not always welcome, though Jan Tinbergen’s students on study tours of Africa were amongst those that were. Each visiting mission had a different agenda and different aims; and, as head of the planning unit, Stolper had to meet with them all.

We can get a good idea of how insistent these three planning circles—his immediate planning team, the wider Nigerian circles of politics, and these international missions and visitors—were to Stolper’s life when we construct an average day out of his diary. Typically, he would begin work at eight a.m. with meetings at ministries or with a civil servant from the federal or regional offices, or working with his immediate team in the planning unit office on some set of calculations, followed by further such meetings until one p.m., at which point he would probably have a lunch with a visiting missionary or with one of the other ministry’s civil servants. Lunch would be a slow affair, and if he were lucky he could snatch an hour playing his piano or records before meetings began again at five or six p.m., often interrupted by another working-cum-social event at seven or eight, often with a visiting mission member, followed by another at dinner nominally at nine p.m. (but which sometimes did not begin until ten), and home at one or two in the morning. Most of his social time was also spent with others in these planning circles, so even the beach barbecues or the nightclub visits (where he felt obliged to participate in the local “high life” dance) would involve talking, cajoling, finding stuff out, arguing with others, and discussing problems and strategies. It is no wonder that he complained of lack of sleep. His own calculating activities were often only viable in the peace of home work on the weekend.Footnote ³⁴

This punishing daily cycle entailed many arguments—with other ministries, those from other regions, and, most awkwardly of all, with Prasad, Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister—about how to do planning. Prasad had been brought in from the World Bank, for in breaking away from the colonial power, the Nigerians wanted an adviser with experience of underdevelopment. But it was not clear how far Nigeria was like India either politically or economically. Stolper admired Prasad’s political skills, but not his economic intellect. They had many political battles over their respective ranges of responsibility, and scientific battles over economic policy.Footnote ³⁵ And he was most fiercely opposed to Prasad’s version of planning.

In Stolper’s understanding, Prasad saw planning as a series of investment projects and encouraged politicians to dream about big projects, promising them that money would always be forthcoming (presumably either from the international missions, or from the domestic printing press) and that everything would be OK. It is true that such project planning was, at this time, the main development recipe of the World Bank. But Stolper was adamant that this was dangerous not just because it raised the wrong expectations amongst politicians and people, and encouraged lack of budgetary control, but primarily because it took no account of the aggregate resource constraints within which all the projects had to fit and so ignored all the consistency issues that obsessed Stolper in his calculations:

In Stolper’s view, Prasad’s planning involved no constraints and no responsibility at macro level, and perhaps no real micro-analysis at the level of physical resource planning. For Stolper, this was a “no theory” approach to planning!

For Stolper, an economic plan needed to provide a reliable form of economic knowledge, and consistency was the hallmark that attested to its credibility. It is this consistency which Stolper sought to preserve in each new circulation via his aggregate technocratic approach, and so ensure the consistency not just between the parts of the plan but between where the economy is now, and where it might be in the future. This is why Stolper was so upset and angry at the final moment when Prasad’s action in changing one of his figures made the whole plan inconsistent. He wrote in his diary: “The whole point of a consistency test is to see whether consistent assumptions yield consistent results—which they did not!” (Diary Reference Gray2003, 290). An inconsistent plan for the future, by infecting the facts about the future, would cast doubt on the integrity of the facts that went into the planning documents. Inconsistency in this context did not just break the chain that binds the past and future facts together, but had the potential to unravel the links all the way back through the chain, undermining the past and future facts that had travelled together around the planning circles in the making of the plan.Footnote ³⁶ Without consistency, as Stolper saw it, the plan would not mobilize, and his mission would fail.

How did this political altercation come about? In the final stages of making the plan, after much political activity and successive recalculations of the plan, and its extension from a five- into a six- year plan (to avoid political difficulties over where to cut it) (Diary Reference Gray2003, 226–7), Stolper’s plan was accepted by the Council of Ministers and passed in the Federal Parliament on April 4^th 1962. But even after this apparently final moment, indeed, right after acceptance by Parliament and in the process of its final revisions (to incorporate the final figures from the regions) so that the plan could be published and sent off to the consortium of aid agencies,Footnote ³⁷ Prasad managed to alter a crucial assumption and figure in one of the macro accounts while Stolper was away. These finally revised figures suggested that either expenditure would have to be cut (a difficulty given that the plan was already agreed domestically) or that consumption would have to be cut (not just politically dangerous, but against the whole aim of Stolper’s plan, which was to increase individual wellbeing). To find a way out of this bind, Prasad arbitrarily assumed a larger underspend. From Stolper’s perspective, who had already factored in a certain amount of underspend in the plan, not only would that larger underspend have been unacceptable to the donor community, but the assumption itself created inconsistencies in the plan. This, in turn, meant that it could not be sent to the donor community, nor could it be used for action domestically (Diary Reference Gray2003, 290). These implied consequences caused a huge political problem for Stolper: he was obliged to take his fight to the top levels of the political system, and to spend many frantic hours recalculating the main aggregates of the plan again, in order to re-establish consistency for it to remain acceptable to the Nigerian Federal government and be ready for them to take to the aid donors (ibid., 289–297). Stolper won the political battle, but it was a near thing.

The execution of the plan was announced in the Federal Budget in 1962, with a planned expenditure of £677m, half to be supplied by foreign aid from those international missions.Footnote ³⁸ In the first year, aid donations did not reach their intended level, there were huge price falls in Nigeria’s main agricultural exports, and (ironically following his fight with Prasad), there was a larger than expected underspend. But the real problems came from the already emergent inter-regional rivalry that finally erupted into civil war in 1967, in the middle of the plan’s period. Stolper always remained optimistic about Nigeria’s economy and its future, but because of the political circumstances of the plan’s collapse, his missionary zeal—his obsessive technocratic zeal—in planning a viable economic direction for the country’s economy, now seem tinged with pathos.

7. Mutable mobiles and the importance of the local

The details of this case resonate with several themes in the social studies of quantification over the last few decades, but offer a somewhat different message. We have a history here about mutable mobiles, one which offers some important points of contrast to Bruno Latour’s 1986 account in which the emergence and power of science are dependent on the stabilization of scientific knowledge into various kinds of “marks” that circulate as “immutable mobiles” (Latour Reference Latour1986, 7). Here, by contrast, the technocratic practices depend not on the immutability of economic numbers, but rather on their mutability—a mutability that stemmed from several sources.

First, though Stolper’s economic plan was certainly a mobile document that circulated economic science knowledge around the political planning circles, the plan’s circulation depended on the flexible nature of many economic numbers: that is, its mobility depended on their mutability, not on their immutability. The mutability of these marks in part derived from the iterations of the planning system: between the early elements supplied by the regions, the final elements of the plan, and the ongoing process of gaining more finely-graded evidence. The technocratic elements come in two ways, in valuing the individual projects for action, and in the aggregative-level consistency checking that required repeated calculations of the plan.

The second point to pick up is that this mutability characteristic is inevitable in the economic context of planning, as we know from Martha Lampland’s 2010 account of planning numbers: “false numbers” are inherent in the “formalizing practices” of making plans.Footnote ³⁹ Stolper needed numbers to make the plan, but by definition, planning numbers about projects are not entirely known, and of course there is ignorance about their future in a changing economic world (as reflected in the title of Stolper’s 1966 book Planning without Facts). You have to start somewhere with your best guess. Over time as the plans get filled in with more information, those numbers iterate into something firmer, but they are still numbers about the future, and subject to the changeability of the economy under scrutiny. This does not mean those initial false numbers remain intact and stabilize, but rather they become substituted up to the point of use.Footnote ⁴⁰

The third point is that this mutability in circulation was essential to the gathering of allies that would mobilize their political power into the economic planning process. Here we come to Ted Porter’s 1995 “trust in numbers” argument, namely that we trust numbers because they are collected by agencies we trust and according to “standardized quantitative rules” that we also learn to trust.Footnote ⁴¹ Stolper gathered his planning numbers from many sources, not just a multiplicity of bureaucracies but also other economic actors and agencies. They were not necessarily collected according to standard quantitative rules by a trusted bureaucracy as in Porter’s account, but they were worked upon according to trusted principles provided from economics and accounting, both in the valuing of individual items, and the overall analytical framework. So, the tools were trusted even when the data were soggy because those data were held together by the consistency checks. These were the basic regimes of economic accounting (see footnote 25 above) plus Stolper’s consistency regimes of planning: within the framework, across the framework, between real and financial resources, and over time. These were the basis of trust across the participants involved, even though individual elements numbers, were, as we have observed, highly mutable.

Perhaps more important for the development of trust was the ongoing circulation of consultation amongst the set of political and economic actors in the economy. Everyone, particularly the political actors, had to be kept in the loop. Stolper’s approach was another critical ingredient, for the decentralized kind of planning that he favored depended not just on local knowledge but on local preferences, so that the mutability of numbers was directly built in to the mobilization process. Alliances were heavily dependent upon the trust built up between Stolper’s center of calculation (and his method of planning) and those in the various planning circles who gathered the numbers and proposed their planning choices. He was well aware of this, as we see in the many entries in his diary about discussions with civil servants and the political actors in the network, where he tried to persuade them both to share their knowledge and to accept the transformed numbers that he sent back out from his calculations with their numbers.

All of these discussions were his way of co-opting these allies into accepting the outcomes of his science, his technocratic mode of planning. As he wrote soon after his return to America:

Fourthly, a feature of this kind of case for planning interventions is that context fixes much of the content and so content depends heavily on the context. Consequently, changeability in context requires mutability in content. There are other, simpler kinds of planned interventions using economics, where context may not matter so much to the content of the intervention, and where it is therefore easy “to apply” economic principles in making the policy and thereby intervene. For example, a plan to reduce smoking by fixing the right level of taxes to change behavior and so reduce health budgets does require some tight calculations on relevant evidence, but it is a relatively self-contained intervention and easy to adjust to circumstances. Planning the budget and investments for a whole economy over a five-year period is the opposite level of complexity, even though there was a technically trusted means of dealing with that complexity in a conceptually-based measurement system with its consistency requirements.

It is perhaps no wonder that other nation states preferred in their plans to go after a set of individual project investments, as in Prasad’s recipe (new roads, new mines, etc.), for their development path. According to Stolper’s recipe, by contrast, planning meant to assembling a mountain of information, and outlining and filling in a substantial jigsaw, pulling all the ambitions together into a time frame, and making sure they were affordable. And this meant you had to really know about the economy you were planning. No two-day visiting missions would do; the matter required many months investigating local knowledge. As Stolper claimed, “It cannot be repeated too often that economic development refers to a specific country in specific circumstances of time and place, and policy prescriptions must spring from the recognition of the historic uniqueness” (Stolper Reference Stolper1966, 7). For Stolper, the contents of economic planning must be local, not handed down according to a standard recipe, but these plans must be formulated by following a standard technocratic practice embedded within a social process. Sadly, all his efforts to ensure Nigeria’s future development were rendered asunder by seismic events in Nigeria’s political history and the civil war that broke out very soon after his economic Plan was put into action.