Nigeria's economy, politics and investment

[alhaji_aminu]

salam

Going through the CIA summary of the nations of the world, one cannot but wonder how puny Nigeria's economy is. In trying to reconcile this fact, I decided to compare the economies of Nigeria and Ghana.

ECONOMY

Ghana, we must remember, is a nation of 21 million souls and exports but less than a drop of oil a day. Nigeria on the other hand is a nation of 132 million inhabitants and exports 2 million barrels a day.
As any person who has taken high school economics can attest, the key indicator of an economy's health is the GDP. Nigeria's GDP is $ 110 billion whilst that of Ghana is $ 45 billion. sinking down further, it can be seen that 20% of Nigeria's GDP comes from it's oil export and fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how you see it) nil % percent of Ghana's GDP comes from oil sales.  
Skimming 20% off 110 billion, being Nigeria's GDP, we see that Nigeria's GDP minus oil (contributions) is just twice ($ 88 B) the GDP of Ghana     ($ 45). Considering the fact that the Nigerian population is 6 times the population of Ghana, it is shameful and embarassing beyond belief that we are only able to produce goods & services this little. What this says is that, it takes 1.5 Nigerians worth to produce what a single Ghanian could.
Another important point to be made is that while Nigerian economy is growing by 3.8%, that of Ghana is growing by 5.1%.

POLITICS AND INVESTMENT

As we all know, the year 1999 was supposed to usher in a new era  of freedom and democracy in Nigeria. This culminated in the election of President Obasanjo. Coming with the new government were new laws enacted by the legislature to oversee the privatisation of public parastatals
Public Enterprises (Privatisation and Commercialistion) Act of 1999 and the ammending of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission Decree No. 16, 1995 to make investing in Nigeria more friendly and hassle free for local and international investors. Unfortunately, the good news stops here. While these measure taken were in good faith, their implementation has been nothing but scandalous and crises ridden.
A case in point is the sale of Nitel. Nitel is your quintessential govt agency-big, inefficient, and corrupt ridden. And because the Nigerian govt underwent a period of nationalistic fervor, Nitel has no competitor; hence, you either deal with them or they will deal without you!  As it were, bids were place by a plethora of groups, organizations and fronts- well mainly fronts.
The groups range from decent NEWTEL consortium, involving deutsche telekom in partnership with the Dangote group and some others to the stinking front IIL -Investors International Limited London in partnership with Portugal Telekom. IIL eventually won the bid not because it has the best in terms of technical competence but because 'higher ups' - in the ASO ROCK chambers, made it clear to the BPE (Bureau of Public Enterprises) who their choice were. As it turns out, the IIL hasn't enough money to secure their bid of ($ 1.5 billion, unprecedendent in NIgeria's history) and they ended up loosing almost $ 130 million security deposit. Matter is still in court.

[color= red] to be continued[/color]

[Indabawa]

Unless Nigeria is subjected to the kind of "treatment" Ghana had underwent,we would perpetually continue to wallow in poverty.They had their Rawlings who oversaw the"excision" surgery.When do we have our own Rawling, is the question that begs for an answer!