Nigeria’s rising population, low literacy blocking industrialization –Report

A new report has said that Nigeria’s rising population, low literacy are blocking industrialization in the country.
The report by Renaissance Capital reveals that Nigeria’s alarmingly low literacy rate of sixty per cent will remain a major drag against industrialization in Africa’s most populous nation.
The 2025 Global and Nigeria Macroeconomic outlook report said nations require high literacy levels of around 80 per cent to move higher on the global industrialization ladder.
Roughly 30 million Nigeria adults cannot read or write with adult female literacy rates in some northern states less than 10%, suggesting that these states will continue to record troubling poverty levels for many years.
The report singles out Lagos with a significantly higher literacy levels far above national average adding that local industrialization can be expected to flourish with good policies.
Nigeria’s export per capita which peaked with the spike in oil price of 1980 has remained less than half of that peak over the years and will likely continue to fall over the 2020s and 2030s due to population growth and because the economy cannot industrialize.
A bump up in exports per capita could occur if Nigeria could increase oil production to 2mbpd but oil majors leaving Nigeria onshore fields suggest there is little room of this bump up happening.
According to the report, a reliable, plentiful and cheap supply of electricity is essential for industrialization, noting that the cost of power in most African countries is above that of the rich OECD nations.
Nigeria is caught in a quagmire of rising cost of funds because of the need to tame inflation, but nations require significant amounts of capital to boost power supply and this cost money in a high interest environment like Nigeria.
Renaissance also introduced the nexus between average family size and development, stressing that the sustainable development goal of universal electricity access is hard to sustain in high fertility countries like Nigeria.
Renaissance said countries boom when fertility rate drops below three kids per woman but hardly a chance this fertility rate can be achieved in Nigeria before 2042.
Not only is it that the large family size in Nigeria stands in the way of development, but a person is also ten times more likely to die if born in Nigeria, six times more likely in Tanzania and only five times more likely to die if born in Ghana because of the correlation between under five mortality rates and fertility rate.
The report makes nonsense of the view of many Nigerians that their country is oil rich, saying that not only is it the case that Dubai used its oil wealth better, its net exports of oil per capita is 6,000 barrels per day per 1000 population as against the case of four barrels of oil per day per 1000 Nigerians.
Nigeria is bleeding from rising population and bleeding from being among the lowest revenue collectors in the world with a revenue to GDP ratio of just 14%.
The report said the CBN interest rate hikes from 11.5% in early 2022 to 27.25% now have not been effective.