Get Guardian on Google• Targets 86% private sector investment in drive for $1tr economy by 2030
• What Nigeria needs to achieve $1tr economy, by Soludo
Nigeria has moved beyond the emergency phase of economic reforms, President Bola Tinubu has declared, unveiling a new policy direction focused on translating macroeconomic gains into shared prosperity, industrial expansion and improved living conditions for citizens.
Meanwhile, the Governor of Anambra State, Chukwuma Soludo, has cautioned that Nigeria’s goal of becoming a $1 trillion economy will remain elusive unless the country records double-digit economic growth and attracts substantially greater investment from both government and the private sector.
The President, who said the difficult economic decisions taken since his assumption of office in May 2023 were beginning to yield results, disclosed that the country’s external reserves had risen to approximately $55 billion, while non-oil exports exceeded $6 billion, their highest level in the nation’s history.
He said the administration was now shifting its attention from economic stabilisation to expanding productive capacity, creating jobs, improving electricity supply, increasing domestic production and providing affordable housing.
Tinubu, however, acknowledged that economic growth figures alone would not be sufficient to justify the sacrifices Nigerians had endured, insisting that the ultimate measure of the reforms would be their impact on households and businesses.
He spoke yesterday through the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tajudeen Abbas, who represented him at the presentation of the book, Economic Diversification and Structural Transformation in Nigeria: The Past, The Present, The Future, authored by a member of the House, Abdulmumini Kofa, at the State House Conference Centre, Abuja.
Tinubu, who wrote the foreword to the book, said the next phase of his administration’s economic programme was anchored on the ambition of building a $1 trillion economy by 2030 under the Medium-Term National Development Plan 2026–2030.
Declaring that the country had made progress in overcoming its immediate economic challenges, he said non-oil activities now accounted for approximately 96 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while non-oil exports had crossed $6 billion.
He also said external reserves climbed to about $55 billion, providing more than 14 months of import cover, while non-oil revenue rosefrom N13.63 trillion in 2023 to N16.4 trillion in the first half of 2026.
SOLUDO said that while Tinubu’s administration had successfully pulled the economy back from the brink of collapse and restored some stability, the present growth rate of about four per cent was far too low to drive rapid industrialisation, meaningfully reduce poverty, or create enough jobs for the country’s fast-growing population.
He, therefore, advocated a new phase of bold economic transformation, supported by investment of more than 30 per cent of GDP, sustained industrialisation, competitive exchange-rate policies, and reforms that continue beyond electoral cycles.
The former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said Nigeria’s N68 trillion budget amounts to just about N772 per Nigerian per day, warning that the country’s fiscal capacity remains too weak to fund the massive investments required for economic transformation.
Arguing that despite the huge figures attached to government budgets, Nigeria remained a resource-rich but financially poor country that needed substantially higher revenue and investment to accelerate development.
Speaking on the theme, ‘Speeding Up and Building to Last’, Soludo observed that Nigeria had forfeited considerable time in its economic development journey, and emphasised the need to pursue structural transformation with unprecedented urgency.
