Emerging Economies - Nigeria

The statistics as regards the health of the Nigerian economy are grim.But there was absolutely nothing new or novel in the figures and facts reeled out by Professor Charles Soludo, former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) at a lecture this week at the fourth Progressives Governors lecture series in Kaduna. According to the dismal but indisputable assertions of Professor Soludo, Nigeria’s economy is in deep trouble as a result of the substantial decline in per capital income and our dwindling Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The ex CBN governor’s lecture to the Progressive Governor’s Forum was titled ‘Building the Economies of States: Challenges of Developing Inclusive Sustainable Growth’. Soludo posited that the country’s GDP compressed to 50 per cent from $578 billion after the famous rebasing Program of 2014 to $290 due to huge deterioration in key economic indicators. Consequently capita income has also dropped to $1,500 from $3,100. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has also confirmed this despairing and frightening portrait of the national economy.

According to the NBS, the economy contracted by 2.06 per cent to record the lowest growth rate in three decades. The economy, the bureau also found, shrank by 0.36 percent in the first quarter of 2016 to hit its lowest point in the year, while unemployment grew from 12.1 percent per capita in the first quarter to a record of 13.3 per cent unemployed in the second quarter.

No less a personage than the Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun, admitted as much when she appeared before the National Assembly. Cautiously describing the economy as being in a state of ‘technical recession’, however, the Minister has continued to sound optimistic about the prospects for quick economic recovery. Of course, it is difficult to understand what a technical recession is against the background of the mass unemployment, pervasive hunger, deaths from easily curable diseases, teeming number of out of school youths,...