The statement by the central bank of Nigeria that N5000 will be introduced and N5, N10, and N20 notes will be coined in 2013 has generated a lot of debate. Many of the contributions have however strayed off the key point. Namely, the reason currency notes and coins are necessary. Notes and coins...

Nigeria has long been trying to learn how best to manage boom-bust cycles in global commodity prices, adopting an oil-price benchmark for annual budgets while saving revenues above the benchmark in an excess crude account in the half decade before the 2008/2009 global crisis. The crisis and its...

When Nigeria returned to democracy in 1999, real GDP growth rate was 1.12 percent, consumer price inflation was 6.6 percent, and unemployment rate was 8 percent. 15 years down the road, average real GDP growth is 6.5 per cent, inflation is 7 per cent, but latest available unemployment rate is...

It is necessary to distil some of the economic management lessons from the first three months of President Muhammadu Buhari's regime and highlight needful reforms. Five issues stand out:-While it is true that a myriad of problems were inherited from the previous regime, the new regime appears to...

Nigeria faces a paradox of having Africa's biggest economy but not Africa's biggest government revenue. While Nigerian economy is about 155.4 percent of South Africa's economy, the revenue generated by Nigerian government is only about 79.5 percent of the revenue generated by South African...

Nigeria's economy is Africa's biggest. Indeed, just the largest six of Nigeria's 46 production sectors combine to generate slightly more than South Africa's GDP! However, the sobering sectoral reality is that, beyond the six giant sectors, Nigeria's remaining 40 sectors are mostly small,...

Nigeria's economic situation in 2016 is fast degenerating into early eighties-like doomsday situation in which oil price collapse is translating into a currency crisis, inflationary spiral, fiscal collapse, and recession. This should not be so at all as this time is fundamentally different from...

Since July 2014, after a remarkably favourable half year in which oil price reached a peak of US$115 per barrel and equity market capitalization touched an historic peak of N14 trillion, the Nigerian economy has been buffeted by the twin shocks of global commodity price slump and global...