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In 12 years to June 2019, Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, has lagged behind its sub-Saharan African (SSA) peers in the Sustainable Economic Development Assessment (SEDA) as the country’s score averaged 22.8 over the period.
BusinessDay’s analysis of the SEDA report shows Nigeria’s average score of 22.8 over the last 12 years is no different from its current score of 22.7, ranking 137th position out of 143 countries.
The SEDA report done on a yearly basis from June-June by Bolton Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm, is primarily an objective measure combining data on outcomes, such as in health and education, with quasi-objective data, such as governance assessments.
The report, which is also a relative measure that assesses how a country performs in comparison to either the entire universe of countries or to individual peers or groups and offers a current snapshot as well as a measure of progress over time, ranks countries’ performance on these key indicators on a scale of 100.
In the 10 indicators used, ranking from the lowest to the highest, the country scored 6.2, 6.3, 18.8, 21.1, 21.7, 24.3, 26.0, 51.7, 52.5 and 69.2 in education, income, civil society, governance, infrastructure, health, in equality, employment, environment, and economic stability, respectively.
Gbolahan Ologunro, an equity research analyst at Lagos-based CSL Stockbrokers, said Nigeria’s low score is a reflection of the low level of government spending in those critical sectors of the economy that will improve human capital and development.
“Looking at the indicators used in assessing the country in terms of education, income, health, infrastructure, I think it is clear that Nigeria lags behind its peers in SSA and Africa as a whole in terms of government spending,” Ologunro said.
“If you look at allocation of government expenditure to the health and education sector, it is still poor. And that is where we rank high in lack of access of healthcare and facilities and also for diseases like malnutrition, malaria and other chronic diseases,” he said.
According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Nigeria is still in the low human development category as it ranked 157th position out of the 189 countries that were sampled in 2017. It moved up only by one position from 156th, scoring 0.530 in 2016.
“The data is true in the sense that our GDP and inflation growth figures, how inclusive are these growths? And how has this impacted on the citizens’ welfare?” Maduka Maxwell, an investment administrator at ARM Holding Company, said.
“The people are getting poorer because they are getting less access to amenities, infrastructure is getting decayed despite increase in government spending and a lot has not been achieved with whatever growth we have,” he said.
SSA countries like Mauritius, Botswana, Gabon, Ghana and Namibia did better than Nigeria scoring 57.5, 42.2, 39.8, 38.1 and 36.0, respectively, on an average in 12 years.
“Their government is taking the right steps by putting in the right policies to stimulate and ensure those critical sectors are working well. For example, last year, Ghana, had more Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) that out-performed Nigeria despite having lower population,” Ologunro said.
Nigeria ranks 100 among 180 countries in the 2018 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) which finds that poor air quality is the leading environmental threat to public health.
In terms of income, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Nigeria’s per capita income declined by 40 percent from $3,268 in 2014 to $1,994 in 2017. On education, Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children of more than 13 million in the world, according to the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), and the 2018 Ibrahim Index of African ranked Nigeria 33rd out of 54 African countries in governance.
“We are becoming too consumption focused. We talk more about consumption than production. If we are going to go out of poverty and move up the scale in terms of development, we have to start producing,” said Ayodele Shittu, a lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Lagos.
“We have a lot of manpower who don’t even know where to channel their energy. If we don’t build enterprises, how do we grow and how do we grow new manufacturing companies? And these are the ones that will employ more,” Shittu said.
Nigeria’s real GDP grew at an annual growth rate of 1.93 percent in 2018, compared to 0.82 percent recorded in 2017, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. However, it lags behind a population growth rate of 2.6 percent.
According to the World Poverty Clock, a tool to monitor progress against poverty globally, and regionally, the number of extremely poor Nigerians has risen to 91.6 million in February 2019 from 87 million in June 2018, and the country’s unemployment rate stood at 23.1 percent in the third quarter of 2018, up from 18.1 percent in the same period of 2017.
Ologunro said that for the country to improve in its score, it has to put the right policies and framework that will encourage private sector and investments to stimulate economic growth.
“The way for Nigeria to catch up with the rest of its peers is to ensure that growth in the economy picks up. If it picks up, it will have a diverse multiplier effect on the economy and it will trickle down to all the sectors,” he said.
BUNMI BAILEY
