By neglecting the agriculture and manufacturing
sectors after the discovery of oil, Nigeria has fallen
into a situation, described as the “Dutch disease”,
which makes her economy vulnerable to
downswings in petroleum prices, a former
United States Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Walter
Carrington, has said.
The former envoy, who made this submission
last Monday (October 21, 2013) while delivering
this year’s Convocation Lecture of the University
of Ilorin, noted that “Nigeria is overly dependent
on an oil and gas sector, which provides 70
percent of its federal revenue, but is the source of
a much smaller percentage of jobs than
agriculture which employs 70 percent of the
country's labour force.”
In the Lecture, entitled 'On the Dawn of Nigeria's
Second Century: Challenges to a New Generation',
Ambassador Carrington lamented that “Nigeria
suffers, as do so many other highly endowed
extractive natural resource countries, from what
economists label as the “Dutch disease” whereby
other sectors of the economy such as agriculture
and manufacturing are relatively ignored.”
The Ambassador, who was accompanied to the
University by his Edo State, Nigeria-born wife, Dr.
Arese Carrington, stressed that the second
century must be dedicated to diversifying the
nation's economy away from its over
dependence on oil and to adding value to the
treasure trove of the other natural resources lying
beneath its soil. This, he noted, can be done by
sending not raw materials abroad but rather
enhancing their value at home through a
revitalized manufacturing sector, which refines
and finishes the more than 30 different minerals
lying beneath the nation's soil.
Mr. Carrington said, “At Independence in 1960,
Nigeria's annual agricultural crop yields were
higher than those of Indonesia and Malaysia.
Today, they have dwindled to half as much. The
fact that Nigeria's current yield per hectare is less
than 50 percent of that of comparable developing
countries dramatically demonstrates how much
Nigeria has abandoned its once promising
agricultural sector. Until Nigeria is able to rely less
on capital intensive sectors of the economy and
more on labour intensive ones it will be difficult to
see how it will meet its ambitious goals to make
the country one of the world's 20 most important
economies.”
Charging the nation to realise its full potentials
especially through agricultural revolution than
over dependence on oil, the former diplomat
lamented that Nigeria had been too long an
under-performer on the world stage, adding that
it had ceded to South Africa the pride of place as
Africa's leading spokesman.
Mr. Carrington explained, “Even when oil prices
were historically high, the national
unemployment rate, instead of falling, rose from
21 percent in 2010 to 24 percent in 2011. As the
African Development Bank report pointed out,
Nigeria's recent economic growth has been
mainly driven by the non-oil sector because of
high consumer demand. The cruel irony is that
whatever Nigeria and others in Africa might do to
improve their economies their efforts in the short
run could be undone by a renewed global
financial crisis.
“When the G-8 or other gatherings of the world's
most powerful nations occur, it is more often to
Johannesburg that they call than to Abuja on
those all too rare times when they seek an African
perspective” the Convocation Lecturer noted.
The octogenarian diplomat identified corruption
and insecurity as two reasons why Nigerians in
the Diaspora are reluctant to return to the
country, adding that developed countries of the
world including the United States profit from
Nigeria's greatest export, which is her
accomplished people.
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