Tapping into Exportation; An opportunity for Nigeria to Grow
In today’s world, importation and exportation continue to thrive across countries as more countries focus more on their area of strength to provide goods and services that other countries do not provide thereby making them one of the sole exporters of such services or products. This brings about a boost in the country’s economy.
According to the latest Foreign Trade Analytics Report released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the value of total trade fell sharply by 27.30% in Q2 2020 compared to Q1 2020 and 27.46% compared to Q2 2019.
Exportation has proven to be one of the easiest and fastest ways a country could improve its economy as well as increase its employment rate by providing products and services that are in high demand outside the country. This, in turn, supports the country by bringing a rise to the labour force thereby making the employment rate rise across the various sectors of the country’s economy.
For example, Singapore’s 8.6 million population exports $208 billion and imports $279 billion. South Africa exports $103 billion and imports $77 billion. Countries with less than 20 million people—Qatar, Denmark, Sweden, etc.—all have larger exports than Nigeria with a population of about 201 million.
To expand our economy, we devise answers to questions like what are we going to sell to the outside world? Export-led growth is vital to address structural issues like labour productivity and external reserves.
The Nigerian Government needs to intensify efforts to ensure that sectors that other countries are thriving on to boost their economy are strongly considered in order to develop our nation. Such sectors include agriculture, mining or even assembling of phones etc. Nigeria’s non-oil sector exports declined by over 46% from ₦1.16 trillion in 2015 to ₦630 billion in 2017. Our nation being solely dependent on oil as its major source of revenue is not beneficial to the country as we have rightly seen especially in these unprecedented COVID-19 times.
Nigeria still needs to tap into a lot of its resources and increase exportation of its produce to reach into full potential as the ‘Giant of Africa’.
Ordinarily, the logistics sector of importation and exportation, if fully engaged will create numerous job opportunities and also make transactions very smooth and easy as we do at TGL. Our services cover logistics, commodities trading and providing EPC services in the energy sector and other related sectors. With a team of over 50 years’ combined experience in freight forwarding, out-country and in-country logistics, compliance/documentation, and core technology services and we are more than able to ensure that the logistics process(es) of your business stays afloat despite the difficulties that COVID-19 presents.