To tackle youth unemployment in the country which is around 64 percent of the total labour force, Nigeria would need to create 19 million jobs annually within the next decade, Doyin Salami, renowned economist and head of the presidential Economic Advisory Council (ECA), said.
The country would also need to grow at an average of 6 percent in the next decade, Salami said, Tuesday, while delivering a keynote speech at the capital market conference organised by the Nigerian Stock Exchange.
“Nigeria needs to be creating 19 million jobs annually in the next ten years for it to tackle youth unemployment. It also needs to grow at an average rate of 6 percent annually in the next decades, above population growth of 3.2 percent, for there to be any meaningful development in the country,” Salami said at the conference which had over five state governors, including Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State and Babajide Sanwolu of Lagos State, with the theme “Privatization in Nigeria and the Outlook for Subnational Economic Development”.
According to Salami, there’s a huge fiscal constraint, worsened by the pandemic, as such, the Federal and State governments alone lack the firepower to move the needle in the country.
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He noted that the country will need huge investments if it must achieve such growth, and these investments can only come from private space.
Salami wondered that in a world awashed with over $19 trillion in private capital being invested in negative yield assets, Nigeria is still struggling to attract private investments to create jobs and grow its economy.
“Investment is the fundamental catalyst for growth,” Salami said. “Our investment to GDP ratio of around 18 percent is too low. We should be doing around 30 percent to boost growth,”
He tasked state governments to increase transparency and clarity so as to allow investing private sectors to determine what state projects are of interest to them to invest in.
“The subnational governments are closer to the people more than the Federal. Privatization of subnational assets is prerequisite for progress,” Salami Said
