Manufacturing, Agric Sectors’ Underperformance Weakens Industrialisation

The underperformance of Nigeria’s manufacturing and cultivation sectors is importantly weakening the country’s industrialisation efforts.

Industry stakeholders attributed the existent sector’s underperformance to aggregate challenges constraining the realisation of its immense potential.

These see persistent structural challenges, including an unreliable powerfulness supply, inadequate infrastructure, constricted entree to affordable finance, regulatory bottlenecks, and the important simplification of user purchasing powerfulness driven by rising inflationary pressures. This has weakened home request for locally produced goods, further worsening the wide challenges confronting the manufacturing sector.

The stakeholders argued that the imaginable of betterment successful the manufacturing assemblage would beryllium connected implementing argumentation stimuli and export-focused commercialized strategies, and called for argumentation interventions for the sector, including overseas speech (FX) stability, improvement funds for manufacturing, and improved infrastructure, particularly electricity.

According to the GDP study for the archetypal 4th (Q1) 2025, agriculture grew by lone 0.7 per cent and manufacturing by 1.7 per cent, arsenic these sectors are indispensable for economical inclusion, occupation creation, self-reliance, economical security, and diversification.

Speaking connected the data, the director-general of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Segun Ajayi-Kadir, lamented the underperformance of the manufacture assemblage successful general, particularly the manufacturing sector, adding that manufacturing maturation has remained uneven and fragile crossed subsectors.

He noted that the caller rebasing of the GDP has further exposed the structural weaknesses successful the country’s productive base, peculiarly successful manufacturing, which is cardinal to immoderate ambition of gathering a resilient, competitive, and inclusive economy.

According to him, manufacturing is structurally weak, with sub-sectors that should beryllium maturation drivers performing beneath potential, arsenic indicated successful the report.

Based connected the fig released, the mean yearly maturation complaint of the manufacturing assemblage betwixt 2019 and 2024 is antagonistic (-0.76 per cent).

“More worrisome is the underperformance of the manufacturing sector. Despite its captious relation successful occupation creation, export diversification, and economical transformation, the sector’s publication to GDP remains debased and progressively volatile.

“Key subsectors specified arsenic lipid refining and centrifugal conveyance assembly person recorded accordant declines successful existent output, eroding Nigeria’s concern performance.”

The MAN DG urged the authorities to prioritise manufacturing and industrialisation to bespeak the existent economical concern and gains of the country’s rebased GDP, saying that “Nigeria indispensable re-industrialise to execute inclusive growth, physique export capacity, and trim dependence connected superior commodities and informal activities.

“We impulse the authorities to prioritise manufacturing successful policy, financing, and infrastructure development, due to the fact that without a beardown concern base, GDP enlargement whitethorn conscionable go a hollow statistic.”

He advocated a manufacturing-led maturation strategy, adding that this indispensable see sector-specific interventions specified arsenic vigor reliability for manufacturers, incentivised section contented policies, streamlined regulatory frameworks, and strategical commercialized facilitation to boost competitiveness.

“We telephone for urgent rebalancing of economical policies successful favour of productive sectors, particularly manufacturing. The existent structure, heavy reliant connected services and superior production, is not sustainable for semipermanent development,” Ajayi-Kadir stated.

PwC’s report, ‘Mid-year reappraisal and updates: H2 2025 economical outlook,’ stated that “to thrust existent assemblage maturation successful 2025, Nigeria indispensable stabilise macro-economic fundamentals and instrumentality targeted interventions that amended entree to affordable concern (especially for MSMEs), code vigor and FX constraints, heighten infrastructure delivery, and guarantee regulatory reforms (like taxation reforms) beforehand easiness of doing business.”