Pondering over Nigeria's fate as she clicks 62, no matter how you cut it, the country's future has got to be Germanic with largescale manufacturing and heavy industry as out centre of gravity

Ayo Akinfe

[1] We can mull over this until kingdom come but the fact remains that there is no way a nation of 200m people can survive unless it starts manufacturing its own goods. Even if we had zero corruption and all our leaders were saints, we would still be in a crisis

[2] There is no way the rest of the world can manufacture enough consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, heavy machinery, armaments, etc for 200m people. Never had happened, never will happen. We manufacture what we require or we perish! It is as simple as that

[3] Any Year One economics students can explain that the value of the primary products we export will always be less than the cost of the finished goods we import. We will thus always have balance of trade and balance of payment deficits

[4] Do you know that manufacturing only accounts for 7% of Nigeria's gross domestic product (GDP). This for me is at the root of all our problems. Boost that figure to 70% and we will live in a paradise

[5] Do you know the global average with regards to manufacturing as a percentage of GDP is 30%. When we only have about one quarter of that, you can see why we are in trouble

[6] In China, manufacturing as a percentage of GDP is a whopping 40% and in developing economies similar to Nigeria such as Indonesia, Mexico, Iran and Brazil, it is 47%, 34.2%, 40.6% and 27.4% respectively

[7] Nigeria currently has a GDP of $550bn. If we can double the contribution of manufacturing as a percentage of GDP, I think we can easily boost that figure to $1trn

[8] No matter how many dollars you throw at the naira, any respite is temporary as ultimately, the strength of your economy is what really determines the value of your currency. We import so much that any vagaries in the global currency market automatically has an inflationary impact on Nigeria

[9] We have a lot to leverage on as we can use agriculture as a basis to manufacture agri-based products. We also have enough solid minerals to began manufacturing finished industrial goods like pipe rods, machine tools, ball bearings, etc. We also have enough oil and gas to become a major player in the global petro-chemicals industry

[10] We simply need to get Nigeria manufacturing to move on to the next rung of the ladder. We need the margins from manufacturing to offset the volume of imports, to increase our export earnings from the current $50bn to around $100bn and to end the dependency on oil. In all the other sectors, the margins are simply not high enough to have a dramatic effect on the economy.