When the new administration was inaugurated in 2023, President Bola Tinubu laid out the basic underlying visions of the Renewed Hope Agenda. A significant iteration of that agenda is the vision of Nigeria becoming a $1tn economy by 2030. This is a very noble vision that is consistent with the urgency of making Nigeria a great economy. It is a vision that could jumpstart the Renewed Hope Agenda into transforming the well-being of Nigerians. However, we also have to situate this vision within Nigeria’s governance and economic realities.
To get to where Nigeria really can begin to make a significant improvement in the lives of Nigerians, the Nigerian state needs to be an enabling and capable developmental state. However, the governance and economic realities on the ground as of the 2023 commencement point, only reiterate how difficult but not impossible the vision of transforming the Nigerian economy is. A developmental state depends on government effectiveness, which is determined in terms of not only the government’s regulatory efficiency but also public sector accountability and how well the government is able to adapt its comparative advantages to the dynamics of the global economy. Unfortunately, Nigeria’s performance on the Government Effectiveness Index—a key dimension of the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators—remains significantly below global norms. The 2023 performance is not salutary: on a scale ranging from –2.5 to +2.5, Nigeria’s score stood at –0.85 (up from –1.04 in 2022, but still far below the world average of approximately –0.04). This ranked Nigeria at 151 out of 193 countries.
To materialise this vision of a $1tn economy by 2030—just about five years away—we truly need more than statistical and econometric analysis. What is needed is a huge dose of institutional strategy that translates visions into realities. This is because Nigeria’s sub‑optimal performance in the WGI and other significance economic and development indices reflects persistent institutional weaknesses in the form of (i) limited civil service professionalism, (ii) policy inconsistency and implementation bottlenecks, (iii) poor quality of public service delivery, and (iv) inadequate accountability and oversight mechanisms. Most particularly, achieving the goal of a $1tn economy by 2030 requires that Nigeria sustain an average annual real GDP growth rate of approximately 6–7 per cent, significantly higher than its historical average of 2.7 per cent over the past two decades. Achieving this requires removing key barriers to growth, including inadequate infrastructure, low productivity, fiscal leakages, and, most importantly, a human capital deficit in both the public and private sectors.
It is clear, from so many indications, that Nigeria has still not registered the developmental implications of Nigeria’s youth bulge—a demographic situation that currently places the median age of many Nigerians at 18.1 (meaning over half of the population, or 58 per cent, are under the age of 30). There is a connection between Nigeria’s low human capital index (currently at 38/100, compared to 92 in South Korea and 85 in Malaysia), and her labour productivity has been growing at a rather sluggish 0.9 per cent per annum, compared to the 3-4 per cent that defines the high-performing Asian economies.
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