EFFECTS OF INDUSTRIAL ABANDONMENT ON THE SOUTH-EAST’S PATH TO STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION AND JOB CREATION

The strategic conduct and execution of transparent industrial policy provide an essential benchmark for measuring the quality of structural transformation in a sub-national region. Credible industrial revival serves as the primary mechanism through which a population actively participates in sustained job creation by restoring and operating productive assets as regional public goods. This process builds public confidence in economic governance and rekindles the prospect of consolidating market institutions, particularly in regions that historically possessed a robust manufacturing base. In the Southeastern region of Nigeria, the industrial landscape since the end of the Eastern Regional era (1954–1966) has been characterized by widespread factory abandonment, severe asset-stripping, and chronic capacity underutilisation. This trend has worsened with successive state-creation exercises, administrative fragmentation, and macroeconomic shocks—a trajectory running from the Okpara administration through post-civil war reconstruction, the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), and contemporary power sector crises. During these phases, energy deficits, joint-ownership deadlocks, foreign-exchange exposure, and policy volatility proliferated. How have such systemic abandonments affected the quality of regional development in the South-East? How do industrial governance failures impact employment outcomes and youth labor absorption? Can structural transformation be consolidated when key manufacturing assets remain moribund? How can the South-East chart a credible path toward stabilizing and modernizing its industrial base? This paper presents a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis addressing these questions, drawing on primary field survey data (N = 450), physical site audits of fifteen iconic industrial facilities, and a regionalized Leontief input-output employment multiplier model. Grounded in a synthesized framework combining Big Push theory, Evolutionary Economic Geography, and New Institutional Economics, we argue that the mere physical existence of industrial assets cannot strengthen economic development in The South-East; rather, structural transformation depends on how transparent, coordinated, ownership-secure, and power-guaranteed the region's industrial process is.