By now, you’ve already decided who your preferred candidates are for the public offices to be contested at the polls this weekend. You’ve weighed the options, thought through their proposals, and figured which ones merit your votes. Or maybe you’ve always had your choice locked in anyways, and Saturday’s elections will be a long-awaited opportunity to put it down a box.
While it’s unlikely that there are many undecided voters around at this point, it may be worth the task to go over the things that motivate the electorate to pick any particular candidates or swing the way of the political parties they opt to align themselves with. Do questions about economics and the state of feature in their thoughts as they these things?
We should be concerned about these issues. At least, the promises being made by the candidates themselves indicate as much: talk of a minimum wage, the ease of doing business, agricultural policy, and poverty and underdevelopment are all big when the elections come around. Government policy ultimately plays a big role in determining your business’s success, or whether it survives at all. Nigeria’s last recession bears this out quite clearly.
So, what particular things should inform our voting decisions? Here’s a list of five, which economic experts are pointing to as big touchstone issues to be borne in mind by the electorate.
1. Economic Growth
It’s sometimes hard to convince the average person on the street that GDP figures reflect anything about the world around them. But they’re still among the best measures for economic performance of any state, region or country. If you’re acquainted with the data for Nigeria, you may want to think about how they’ve indicated the country’s situation over the past few years, and how they may change given the policy stances of the candidates and political platforms seeking your votes.
Just this week, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that Nigeria’s GDP grew by 2.38% in the last three months of 2018. Overall, economic output expanded by 1.93% in the last year, a significant improvement on the 0.8% growth rate recorded in 2017. We should remember that the country suffered a biting recession in 2016, in which its economy shrank by -1.6%. Those were days of massive job losses and company shutdowns. The NBS’s figures suggest we’ve gone past those lows.
However, Nigeria remains far off from the heights it attained in the past. This isn’t helped by the fact that its population is growing at a much faster rate than its economic output (between 2% and 3% per annum). This by itself is a perfect condition for rising poverty- which we have actually witnessed in the past few years. There’s more on this later in the article.
2. The State of the Country’s Business Environment
The World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Report for 2018 ranks Nigeria 146th in a list of 190 countries with respect to the ease with which businesses can set up and operate in those countries. This meant that the country fell one spot from 2017 when it had occupied the 145th spot. Supporters of the current administration’s policies may point to the fact that the 2017 position actually represented a jump by about 24 places; in the year before, it was 169th.
The World Bank’s 2018 report noted improvements in the registration of companies with the Corporate Affairs Commission and the introduction of online payments for stamp duty. However, the overall picture seemed to suggest that the pace of reforms had slowed.
Although there have been moves to improve the immigration processes to allow easier access to the county for tourists and investors, it’s not exactly clear that these initiatives have brought about a significant improvement in Nigeria’s fortunes in these areas.
One important thing to consider is how MSMEs are faring at the moment. Although there’s talk of growth across sectors, many of these businesses are struggling to get by. And because they constitute over 90% of businesses in the country (and contribute 54% of its economic output annually), they’re crucial to its development.
Some of the Federal Government’s social intervention programs (such as MarketMoni) are targeted at these ventures. Again, it’s still not clear that reaching a few hundred thousand businesses with small cash injections will strongly affect a 37 million MSME economy. This same drop-in-the-ocean query may be placed on many of the government’s other social intervention projects.
3. Unemployment
As always, this has been one of the big discussion points in the lead up to the 2019 elections. At this point in time, the data doesn’t look very good. Figures from the NBS show that in the third quarter of 2017, 18% of the country’s labour force was unemployed. By the third quarter of 2018, this had jumped to 23.1%- no thanks to a staggering 3.3 million Nigerians join the army of people without jobs in just a year.
A deeper dive into the data shows that much of this troubling statistic is being driven by rural unemployment, which rose by 7.5% in the period covered by the NBS’s report. If unemployment is going to be tackled effectively, the commerce of our villages and semi-urban areas will need to be reinvigorated.
4. Poverty
Nigeria currently has the highest rate of extreme poverty on the planet, having overtaken India in 2018. At that time, the number of very poor Nigerians was put at about 86 million. By February 2019, this number had gone up to 91 million.
Given the reported strides being made in agriculture, mining and other key sectors of the Nigerian economy, a reduction in these figures is perhaps expected; or maybe not. As has already been pointed out, economic output isn’t keeping up with the country’s population growth rate. Again, economic theory tells us that this is a recipe for rising poverty.
5. The Long Term Future
There are questions ringing out from the future, begging for answers. Do we have a clear cut strategy for a post-fossil fuel guzzling world, which no longer needs our oil? Are we ready for the immense pressure on our towns and cities that will come with the desertification and drying lakes and rivers of the rural areas, especially up north, or the depletion of arable land across the regions? And how will a population of 400 million (what we’ll have by 2050) cope with these challenges?
These are the questions we may need to think through as we head for the polls this season. It is up to us to decide how they will be answered.
References
National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) E-Library: National GDP reports, Unemployment Report 2018
United Nations World Population Prospects
Featured image source: Government and Business Journal