As Nigeria gets richer, more Nigerians live in poverty. That’s the paradox of growth in Africa’s biggest oil producer, its most populous nation and which, as of March 31, may be its top-ranked economy.
The National Bureau of Statistics is recalculating the value of gross domestic product based on production patterns in 2010, the first time it’s overhauled the data in two decades. That may boost the size of the economy by as much as 60 percent to between $384 billion and $424 billion, according to London-based Renaissance Capital Ltd., putting Nigeria ahead of South Africa and close to Austria and Thailand in the World Bank’s global league table.
Yet the most recent poverty survey by the Nigerian statistics agency, published in 2012, shows that 61 percent of Nigerians were living on less than a dollar a day in 2010, up from 52 percent in 2004. In the desert north, where Amnesty International estimates more than 600 people have been killed this year as the government struggles to quell a violent Islamist insurgency, poverty is even more stark.
Joblessness among young Nigerians may undermine economic progress in a nation where 23.9 percent of the working population is unemployed, according to data from the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook. It estimates that 62 percent of the nation’s 177 million people are below the age of 25. READ MORE
Source: www.africainvestor.com #IFAMAFRICA
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