Tinubu-led govt tackles AfDB Akinwunmi Adesina over economic retrogression comment
Bayo Onanuga, President Bola Tinubu’s spokesperson, has faulted AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina’s claims on the retrogressing living standards of Nigerians. Adesina, as Onanuga claimed, claimed Nigeria’s GDP per capita in 1960 was $1847, as against the $824 it is presently.
“The quoted figures are not correct”, Onanuga said. Onanuga contradicted Adesina by stating that the 1960 GDP was actually $4.2 billion in 1960 while per capita income of its 44.9 million citizens then was $93. The presidential further in his analysis showed that the GDP and per capital income of Nigerians had fluctuated between 1970 and 1982.
“These facts raise questions about the source of Dr Adesina’s figures,” Onanuga said.
“Dr Adesina should know that GDP per capita is not the only criterion used to determine whether people live better lives now than in the past. Indeed, it is a poor tool for assessing living standards. Its primary usefulness is in giving us the metrics to compare economic output in a country or between countries,” Onanuga explained.
Onanuga added that a country’s GDP does not always capture a country’s entire activities. He said, “It neither discloses wealth distribution or income inequality nor accounts for the informal economy.”
“It does not account for subsistence farming or income transfer from one family member to another. GDP per capita is silent on whether Nigerians in 2025 enjoy better access to healthcare, education, and transportation, such as rail and air transport, than in 1960.”
“Compared with 1960, Nigeria today has more primary, secondary, and tertiary schools. We have more road networks and more medical facilities, private and public. We have phenomenal access to telephones. At Independence, we had 18,724 operational phone lines for a population of about 45 million. Over 200 million Nigerians now enjoy near-universal access to mobile phones and digital services, indicating we are better off today than 65 years ago.
In our country, policymakers know that whatever GDP figure NBS publishes may not capture our economy’s full depth and breadth if it fails to include the informal economy, which some pundits have said may even be more significant than the formal economy.”
Also, Onanuga cited the advent and progress of mobile telephony in Nigeria presently, compared to the 1960s analogue telecommunication system.
“No objective observer can claim that Nigeria has not made progress since 1960,” Onanuga affirmed.
“Today, as we await the NBS’s recalibration of our GDP, we can comfortably say without contradiction that it is at least 50 times, if not 100 times, more than it was at Independence,” he said.
