The Time Of The
Gross Domestic Producers By Okey NdibeThat Nigeria has passed South Africa as Africa’s largest economy—when calculated by Gross Domestic Product—is almost old news. The coverage of that feat afforded Nigeria’s image a rare shining moment in the foreign media. As Uri Friedman wrote in The Atlantic, “Something strange happened in Nigeria on Sunday: The economy nearly doubled, racking up hundreds of billions of dollars, ballooning to the size of the Polish and Belgian economies, and breezing by the South African economy to become Africa's largest. As days go, it was a good one.”
But many Nigerian pundits were far from
impressed. Some were skeptical about the whole “re-basing” rhetoric. Some went
as far as suggesting that Abuja fudged and rigged its way to first place.
Others sought to restore perspective to the triumph by drawing attention to
Nigeria’s perennial and persistent woes—among them a dismal infrastructure,
scant electric power supply, run-away rates of unemployment, and miserable wages
for the lowest brackets of workers.
In a piece provocatively titled
“Okonjonomics Or When a Finance Minister Turns Money-Doubler,” Ogaga Ifowodo, a
poet, professor, lawyer and political activist, cut to the heart of the matter.
He wrote: “So if Nigerians went to bed in the night of Saturday, 5 April 2014,
with N42.4 trillion naira in their collective pocket, and woke up the next day
to their statistician-general’s revelation that they had grown richer by N37.8
trillion while they slept, wouldn’t they be fools to believe it if they remain
as hungry and angry, homeless and jobless, as they were when they closed their
eyes the night before?
