Business, Featured
By Anthony Isibor
ADETOLA Adegbayi, Founder/Chief Executive Officer, Mutual Specialists says that Nigeria is a poor country when compared to its GDP per capital is taken into account.
Speaking at the Business Journal Annual lecture held in Lagos on Tuesday, she said that although within the economic data, Nigeria would be the second largest GDP , leading people to assume that Nigeria is so rich, so blessed, when in reality it is one of the poorest countries in Africa and also one of the poorest countries in the world.
And how do you know when a country is poor? You basically do the GDP per capita. There’s a tendency to say that Nigeria defies economic theories, but that is incorrect. Nigeria actually leads right within the economic theories of development
According to her, because of our population, Nigeria’s GDP per capital is one of the lowest in the world, which means that if we were to divide the wealth of Nigeria among her citizens, each person would barely have $1,000 in their pockets
Comparing the nation’s economy to a country like Seychelles, which basically depends a lot on tourism, Adegbayi said that although they have a very small population, good environment, good climate action, they are also the richest in terms of GDP per capital, whereas if you divide their wealth, you will probably have about $20,000 in each person’s pocket.
So when you look at it from the money we have divided to all of us, you will then begin to realize that we are not a rich country, we are a very poor country.
Speaking on the theme of the lecture “Repositioning of the Insurance Industry to drive Sustainable Economic Growth and Development”, Adegbayi said that Nigeria must first face the reality of the facts that it is a poor country before it can ever begin to find ways to come out of that poverty.
She also described as incorrect, the tendency to say that Nigeria’s economy ‘defies understanding’ because according to her “Every year, the Bureau of Statistics publishes data of the areas of our economy and how we’re doing, you know, whether we’re doing well or not. you find that we’re heavily concentrated on Agric and trade.”
The CEO of Mutual Specialists, however, urged the Nigerian government as a developing economy to avoid the danger to speak the same language as the average developed industrialized nation, which leads us to reduce our own competitiveness, and concentrate instead on areas within our developing economy that would also help us to leapfrog.
Some of these areas, according to her, include: Forestry, Transporting, Service, insurance, etc.
She said that Forestry depletion has been going on in Nigeria for a while and urged the government and private sectors to find ways to invest more in forestry preservation.
According to her, based on 2023 statistics, for example, the contribution of forestry to GDP was 0.172% in terms, but that improved slightly to 0.185%.
Highlighting the importance of forestry as a means of leapfrogging into the new economy, she harped on “green bonding” as a way of also contributing to the biodiversity of the world.
“There’s need for investment in forestry, meaning not buying forests to destroy and create houses, but buying forests to actually keep and use for recreation and biodiversity.
“Another angle that we need to look at, you know when we’re looking at the economy, is even in terms of what is called the legacy industry.
“We’re talking about refining, for example. All of us know the politics of that, but we’re not doing enough of that.
“How do we help our government to actually break what is going on in terms of, you know, creating a monopoly for government and ensuring that the license to actually refine is more liberal, so that we can improve our industrial complex?
“Now, that industrial complex is part of what is also contributing against the climate action. Now, we then have to find ourselves in the politics of climate action as well.
“How do we respond to that? We need to balance that climate action in terms of refining with biodiversity, in terms of forest preservation, so that at the end of the day, we come to what is called a net zero, or should I say net positive, which is really what I prefer to call it.
“We have a lot of gaps also, which I’ll quickly run through, in terms of water supply, sewerage, and waste management, we have gaps in terms of even transportation. We see lots of cars on our roads, but, you know, we still have that gap.
“We have gaps in terms of energy, we have gaps in terms of services. (And, interestingly, our employment also is heavily dependent on government in terms of the formal sector.)
“In terms of the informal sector, we have lots of people who are either working for themselves or just trying to eat a living by doing, you know, jobs. So, therefore, when you look at it statistically, it says we have high employment. But we actually have, from the formal sector, a lot of unemployment.
“How do we formalize our industries so that we can begin to capture areas of growth that would help us to really make Nigeria become a rich country not by itself as a corporate entity but by the nature of the individuals of Nigeria who are then able to you know support themselves and support their families and also create an environment where wealth inequality becomes reduced. Now I’m going to take that straight into insurance.” She said.
A.I
Nov. 27, 2024
Tags: Adetola Adegbayi Business Journal
