Print
Email ArticleNigeria can easily achieve double-digit GDP growth if planned economic reforms are implemented and tough decisions are made by government policy makers, central bank governor Lamido Sanusi has said.
Nigeria's GDP is expected to grow by around 7 percent this year. Sanusi said Nigeria now had the right policy makers pushing forward reforms which would ensure Nigeria achieved a significant rise in growth in the coming years.
"The real risk in Nigeria is a policy risk. We have achieved an average of 7 percent growth for the last decade and this is without steady electricity supply or adequate infrastructure," Sanusi said at an industry conference in Abuja.
"GDP can easily move into double-digits ... If we implement all the things planned ... there will be a major step change in growth rates in the next two to three years."
Finance minister and coordinator of the economy Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has announced a roadmap for a Nigerian sovereign wealth fund to be launched by the end of they year.
The government has announced plans to remove costly fuel subsidies and privatise much of the failing power sector, while plans to unlock largely untapped gas reserves and reforms to its agriculture sector are in the planning stages.
But previous reform efforts have often fallen flat and Nigeria is still over-reliant on revenue from oil exports, while political wrangling and corruption are still major brakes on growth in sub-Saharan Africa's second-largest economy.
The mainstay oil and gas industry is stalling because wide-ranging reforms have been stuck in parliament for years.
Sanusi said government recurrent spending was too high and questioned whether there was a need for so many costly ministries. Nigeria's laws mean it has to have a government ministry for each of its 36 states.
TOUGH DECISIONS
He said there was a need to make tough decisions about the laws governing Nigeria if its potential was to be achieved.
Nigeria currently spends more than 70 percent of its budget on recurrent expenditure, meaning most of its money goes on keeping government running rather than on much needed infrastructure projects.
Sanusi said if reforms can be pushed through and properly implemented to spread the wealth generated from Africa's largest crude oil export business to a wider sections of society it would help solve a growing security problem.
A radical Islamist sect has been behind near daily attacks in the remote northeast of Africa's most populous nation. It also took responsibility for Nigeria's first known suicide bombing when a car full of explosives crashed into the side of U.N. headquarters in the capital in August, killing 24 people.
Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is forbidden", says it wants sharia law more widely applied across Nigeria and officials believe it has strengthening ties with al Qaeda's north African wing.
A report commissioned by President Goodluck Jonathan said many of the problems in the northeast are rooted in the government's failure to improve unemployment and poverty.
Sanusi said United Nations advice back in 2000 warned that the northeast faced worrying poverty problems.
"Boko Haram's headquarters are supposed to be in Maiduguri, which is Borno state. By every human development indicator ... show Borno is the poorest state in the country. If Borno were a country on its own it would be poorer than Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon. This was (known) in 2000." Sanusi said.
"Religion or ethnicity are just identity tools that are appropriated to justify violence and express anger. Once the underlying cause is eradicated those things lose their potency."
|
|
