*’Agriculture, which accounts for 23.78% of the total value of production, grew by 1.3 per cent, which, however, is far below the average growth for the period.’
NIGERIA’s economy grew 5.01 per cent year-on-year in the second quarter (Q1) compared to 0.51 per cent posted in the previous quarter.
The growth rate is the highest reported since 2015 when President Buhari assumed office.
The figures, released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) earlier today, points to a strong recovering after about a year of stagnant growth occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The figure, among others, also points to an economy that is gradually erasing the losses of the recent recession that saw production dipping 1.92 per cent last year.
The growth, taking the data on the face value, is also fairly inclusive. Agriculture, which accounts for 23.78 per cent of the total value of production, grew by 1.3 per cent, which is far below the average growth for the period.
The below-the-average growth of agriculture is a blight in a society where income equality gap is already a concern. But what the economy lost to agriculture’s sluggish growth it gained from other inclusive sectors like transportation/storage, trade, construction, real estate and manufacturing. These are sectors with direct impacts on the average people.
Understandably, transportation grew by almost 77 per cent. It would be recalled that activities in the sector were completely grounded in Q2 2020 as the economy was locked down.
Trade also leaped by 22.5 per cent while construction was up 3.7 per cent real-time just as real estate and manufacturing expanded by 3.9 and 3.5 per cent respectively.
The modest growth in the crucial sector is expected to lead to a significant improvement in job creation and economic development on a near-time basis, taking into consideration the lag effect.
Nigeria’s unemployment stood at 33.3 per cent as of the last quarter of last year, making it the second country (next to South Africa) with the worst unemployment rate in the world.
Weighed with the current inflation rate, the country’s misery index, a measure of how miserable an average person is, is pegged at 45.6. That makes Nigerians the 14th most miserable people in the world. Growth in sectors with huge impacts on the people and an increase in the job-creating capacity of the economy will reduce this rating.
In a rare twist of fate, the financial service sector has dipped back to back as Q2 recorded -2.48 per cent growth. However, the insurance sub-sector, for the first time in over a year, recorded positive growth (15.68 per cent) while the financial institution industry, the driver of the category, went down by -4.5 per cent.
The data underscores the same historical structural defects of the economy. For instance, oil, the highest foreign exchange earner and mainstay of public revenue contributed only 7.42 per cent to the GPD. That is about the same figure as the 7.9 per cent average quarterly inputs it has added to the GDP in the past year.
Again, the all-important oil sector slumped by -12.65 per cent year-on-year while non-oil leaped by 6.74 per cent.
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