Nigeria’s economy will continue to struggle in 2023
A new leadership needs to implement widespread reform
By Kinley Salmon: Africa correspondent, The Economist, Abuja
THE FATE of sub-Saharan Africa is entwined with that of Nigeria. One in six sub-Saharan Africans is Nigerian, and its economy is the continent’s largest. A prospering Nigeria helps pull up its neighbours; a stumbling one drags them down. It is a problem, then, that from 2015 to 2020 the economy grew so slowly that the average Nigerian got poorer in real terms.
A commodity-price plunge in 2015 was part of the problem. Yet plenty of damage was self-inflicted. In 2019 the government closed Nigeria’s land borders to all goods, purportedly to stop smugglers competing with local producers. The result was higher inflation. Efforts to prop up the exchange rate by restricting access to dollars made it hard for businesses to import basic inputs. The central bank was forced to repeatedly devalue the naira anyway. Then came the pandemic.
