Analysts want paradigm shift to industrialisation as recession bites

Analysts say Nigeria must now reposition its growth targets by paying more than a passing attention to industrialisation to pull the Nigerian economy out of recession.

According to these analysts, Nigeria should now diversify its export earnings while adding value to agriculture and solid minerals to create enough jobs and get the country out of slump.

“I have always said that unemployment situation in Nigeria is artificial. Once we add value to agriculture and solid minerals, we will not even have enough manpower to handle our potential,” said Waheed Olagunju, acting managing director/ CEO of Bank of Industry (BoI), at the Business Hallmark’s Public Policy Forum held on Thursday in Lagos.

Olagunju said there was a need to arrest the breakdown of morals, which had taken a heavy toll on various sectors of the economy, including education and public service.

“We need quality manpower. But we can hardly achieve this if we are not disciplined. If we produce poor quality manpower from our educational institutions as a result of undue influence on teachers and lecturers, we can hardly have quality manpower. Labour is one of the factors of production and its quality determines the type of leaders we will have in different sectors tomorrow,” he said.

Oscar Onyema, CEO, Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), said Nigeria had only made progress in some indices but retrogressed in poverty reduction when compared with indices of 1960.

“In 1960, Nigeria’s GDP was $4.2 billion, while per capita income was $93, just as population was 45.2 million. Poverty headcount was 15 percent, while average life expectancy was 37.2 years. But in 2014, GDP was $481 billion; per capita income was $2700; population was 177 million, but poverty headcount was 70 percent. Average life expectancy was 53 years,” Onyema noted, adding that countries such as China and Malaysia that were behind Nigeria by 1960 were now far bigger than Africa’s most populous nation.

“Our GDP is already diversified, but we need to diversify our export earnings. We need to harness the power of our population, invest in human capital and make the Nigerian capital market an engine of diversification,” he added.

Ibikunle Amosun, governor of Ogun State, said one key lesson that must be learnt was that no development-desiring nation depended on one commodity no matter how huge it was.

Amosun, who was represented by Olumide Ayemi, Ogun State commissioner for justice and attorney-general of the state, said Ogun had raised its Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) from N700 million when the governor came in, to N6 billion currently, stressing that the state did this without inconveniencing investors.

“We abandoned agriculture and concentrated on crude oil but increased spending on non-capital expenditure. We imported all sort of things. Today, Ghana has overtaken Nigeria as an exporter of cocoa.  I heard that the four seedlings of palm oil taken from Nigeria to Malaysia have made the country the highest exporter of palm oil.  I would rather say we found ourselves in this precarious state because we left undone that which brought us fortunes without blood,” Amosun, who was the guest lecturer, said, while addressing the theme, ‘Restituting the Past for a Greater Nigeria.’