Nigeria is moving to rapidly diversify the country's economy to stop
its dependency on crude oil exports, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari
said on Thursday.
Nigeria has depended on oil as its major source
of revenue in the last three decades at the expense of agriculture and
other sectors, Buhari said. He spoke as he received new ambassadors.
Buhari,
who took power in late May, inherited near-empty coffers, tens of
thousands of unpaid civil servants and an economy battered by a sharp
drop in oil prices. Africa's largest economy and oil producer has also
been plagued by widespread corruption, especially in the oil sector. In
July, a government body revealed more than $20bn in oil revenue to be
missing.
Despite the challenges, Nigeria is still attracting
investment due to the scale of the market, according to analysts. South
African supermarket giant Shoprite announced last week that it will open
14 new stores in addition to the existing 12 in Nigeria.
"Nigeria
isn't a particularly appealing market. It's a very difficult place to
do business, growth is stalling, and the retail sector is much less
well-developed than other markets, like Kenya," said John Ashbourne, the
Africa expert in Capital Economics, a leading macro-economic research
firm. "But the potential for growth is absolutely jaw-dropping if you
manage to get in, as they say, on the ground floor of a country that
could have 500 million people within a few decades. "
Ashbourne said expansion of the economy of just Lagos, the country's commercial capital, is almost as big as Angola's.
"If
independent, [Lagos] would be Sub-Saharan Africa's fourth largest
economy, after the rest of Nigeria, South Africa, and Angola," he said.
Friday, August 28, 2015
President: Nigeria to stop dependency on crude oil
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Write comments