*Say Nigeria has no reason to be poor
African Development Bank (AfDB) President, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, has urged President Bola Tinubu to wake up to his responsibilities and set the country on the path of prosperity.
In his keynote address at the Business Day Chief Executive Officers (CEO) Forum on Thursday in Lagos, the AfDB President noted that until Nigeria wakes up from its slumber, the country will continue to stagnate economically.
According to his address titled: “The Day the Lion Roared! Making Nigeria a Global Industrial and Economic Giant”, the AfDB helmsman said the country had no reason to be a poor country.
”’The day that Nigeria wakes up and becomes a lion king, everything will change for its people; and everything will change for all of Africa.
”Nigeria should never be a poor country; and Nigerians are tired of being poor.
“For now, Nigeria is developing too slowly and well below its potential. The challenge is for the lion to roar. Then we will have the making of an economic giant.
“The key for that is for Nigeria to have an Industrial Revolution,” he said.
Adesina said the share of manufacturing in the GDP of Nigeria had hovered around seven percent in the past decades.
According to him, the nation has not been able to extricate itself from the comatose of its industrial manufacturing sector to unleash the fullness of its potential.
“The performance of the manufacturing sector in the past five years has been poor. Between 2015-2017 the sector declined by -1.5per cent, -4.3per cent and -0.2per cent.
”This is in sharp contrast to the dynamic and rapid performance of manufacturing in Asian countries, such as Singapore, Malaysia, India, and China.
The manufacturing sector of Nigeria represents only three per cent of the total revenue from exports, but accounts for 50 per cent of imports in the country.
“Instead of being forward-looking in expanding the share of the manufactured goods in its total export revenue, Nigeria focuses on the model of import substitution,” Adesina said.
Adesina said further that the country has a manufacturing sector that cannot develop to compete globally, but limits itself to “survival mode” and not a “global manufacturing growth mode”.
He said a well-developed and policy-enabled manufacturing sector, with export orientation will spur greater innovation, industrial policy for export market development, and structural transformation of the economy.
He said rather than being consumed with conserving foreign exchange, the focus should shift to expanding foreign exchange through greater export value diversification.
African countries, including Nigeria, he said have had policies, templates, and programs for industrialization and expanding industrial manufacturing for decades, but there is a huge gap between policy ideas and actions.
