Reject IMF projection of fourth place in Africa’s largest economies, Ex-British envoy urges Nigeria

A former director of the British Council in Nigeria, David Roberts, has called on Nigeria to reject the recent report by the International Monetary Fund  (IMF) which projected that the country would drop from the first to the fourth largest economy in Africa this year. IMF in its recent World Economic Outlook as reported by Bloomberg, estimated Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at $253 billion behind South Africa, $373 billion; Egypt, $348 billion; and Algeria, $267 billion. It predicted that South Africa will remain the largest economy until 2027 when Egypt will overtake it. However, the former British envoy to Nigeria said the country should rely more on data from its statistics, rather than foreign agencies because the domestically gathered information is likely to be more accurate. Roberts pointed out that Nigeria became the largest economy in Africa in 2014 on the strength of data gathered by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Nigeria’s main data repository.