The 2025 sectoral performance data from the National Bureau of Statistics, computed by NESG Research, reveals a dual economy. A handful of sectors like Transportation & Storage (16.9%), Finance & Insurance (14.5%), Water (10.0%), Other Mining (9.7%), Arts & Entertainment (9.0%), Oil & Gas (8.5%), Electricity (8.5%) and ICT (6.9%) are expanding at rates that, sustained, could transform the country within a decade. Alongside them, the economy's heaviest sectors by share of GDP like Agriculture (27.6%, growing at 2.9%), Trade (17.4%, growing at 1.8%), Real Estate (13.6%, growing at 3.8%) and Manufacturing (8.1%, growing at only 1.4%) which are barely keeping pace with population growth. Public Administration (2.0%), Education (2.4%) and Human & Health (2.5%) are similarly sluggish. [1][2]

Chart 1 — Full sectoral growth table ranked. Red bars mark sectors growing below 3%, effectively flat per capita.

The picture sharpens further when share of GDP is placed alongside growth rate. The sectors that employ the most Nigerians and carry the largest economic weight are, with rare exceptions, the slowest to grow. The fast growers tend to be narrow in GDP share but pull the growth contribution forward.

Chart 2 — Each sector plotted by share of GDP (horizontal) and growth (vertical). The bubbles in the lower-right corner — Agriculture, Trade, Manufacturing — represent sectors carrying heavy GDP weight with anaemic growth.

The imbalance is even clearer when the sectors are aggregated. Laggard sectors (those growing below 3%) account for 63% of GDP but contribute just 33% of GDP growth. Driver sectors (those growing above 6%) hold 34% of GDP but deliver 58% of growth. Nigerian growth is concentrated in sectors that employ relatively few people, while the labour-intensive sectors stagnate.

Chart 3 — The dual economy in two pictures. Laggard sectors dominate GDP weight; driver sectors dominate growth.

Table 1 — Sectoral Performance in Nigeria, 2025

The source data for the analysis is as follows.

Source: National Bureau of Statistics | Computation: NESG Research | Classification: Laggard = sectoral growth <3%; Driver = >6%; Moderate = 3–6%.

A Multi-Tier Approach

This article sets out practical, implementable steps to reverse the stagnation. It is organised by sector, and for each sector responsibilities are assigned by tier of government from Federal, State and Local because the 1999 Constitution distributes powers and functions across all three. Most diagnoses of Nigeria's economic problems stop at federal policy. That is a mistake. Basic education, primary health care, rural feeder roads, market sanitation, agricultural extension and municipal solid waste are constitutionally or operationally the business of state and local governments. No amount of federal reform alone will fix them.

The article also incorporates four specific reframings. First, manufacturing's foreign exchange constraints have largely been addressed by the 2023 float and subsequent stabilisation; [13] what remains binding is cost, power, ports and policy consistency. Second, trade's weakness is fundamentally a value-addition and scale problem, as Nigeria exports raw and imports processed, [6][7][8] and the density of nano and micro-traders prevents the scale economies that make formal distribution, digitisation and taxation viable. Third, public education and public health will not recover under direct ministerial management. They need trust-based ownership that institutionalises community co-ownership, attracts non-governmental funding, and lets public schools and hospitals compete on merit. [3][4][5] Fourth, solutions must be assigned to the tier of government that can actually deliver them.

Chart 6 — The four cross-cutting imperatives ranked by the breadth of sectoral impact. Policy stability is the single highest-leverage intervention because it unlocks all six laggard sectors simultaneously.

1. Agriculture (2.9% growth, 27.6% of GDP)

Agriculture is Nigeria's largest sector by share of GDP and its largest source of employment, yet it grew at only 2.9% in 2025 slightly above the population growth of roughly 2.4% but barely so, meaning per-capita agricultural output is essentially flat. The binding constraints are well understood: insecurity in the Middle Belt and North, post-harvest losses of 30–50% on perishables, collapsed public credit schemes, counterfeit inputs, and dilapidated rural infrastructure. [9][10][11] What has been missing is not diagnosis but allocation of responsibility.

Federal Government

• Security architecture for agricultural corridors. Rather than spreading military and police assets thinly, designate 8–10 priority production corridors (Niger–Kebbi rice belt, Benue–Taraba grain and yam belt, Oyo–Ogun cassava belt, Kaduna–Kano cereals belt, Cross River cocoa belt, etc.) and concentrate joint military-police-vigilante coverage under a single operational command in each. This follows Côte d'Ivoire's post-crisis cocoa-zone security model.

• Enabling legislation for state police and regulated forest guards. The federal executive supports this; the National Assembly must pass the constitutional amendments. Without it, insecurity on farms will continue to collapse output in the Middle Belt and North.

• National warehouse receipt framework. Strengthen SEC enforcement of licensed warehouse operators and legislate a default-recovery framework that banks trust, so farmers can deposit grain and borrow against the receipt instead of dumping produce at harvest-time lows.

• Honour the Maputo commitment. Nigeria's 2025 federal budget allocated approximately 1.75% to agriculture, far below the 10% Maputo target.[10] A credible multi-year path to at least 5% with the spend concentrated on rural roads, irrigation and research is overdue.

• Deliver on AGROW. The World Bank's $500m Agricultural Value-Chains for Growth project (2026–2032) is results-based as it pays agribusinesses for outcomes in aggregation, processing and smallholder sourcing.[11] Federal implementation must resist capture and publish disbursement data quarterly.

State Governments

• Farmland security and land administration. States control land under the Land Use Act. Digital land registries, simplified titling for smallholders, and long-lease instruments that allow farmers to pledge land as collateral would unlock rural credit. Kaduna's Geographic Information Service is a useful model for replication.

• Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zones (SAPZs). States hosting SAPZs (Kaduna, Kano, Kwara, Ogun, Oyo, Imo, Cross River, Ondo) must deliver complementary infrastructure like access roads, power, water, and effluent management otherwise the AfDB-financed facilities will underperform. Concessional PPP structures for cold-chain operators, with 5-year viability gap funding, should be the default.

• Exit free-tractor politics. State-owned tractor fleets and subsidised diesel have repeatedly crowded out private mechanisation-as-a-service providers like Hello Tractor, ThriveAgric and TROTRO (in Ghana). States should withdraw and instead co-finance private operator expansion through matching grants.

• Seed certification enforcement. States must partner with the National Agricultural Seeds Council to prosecute counterfeit seed sellers. Counterfeit seeds cost Nigerian maize yields more than fertiliser shortage.

Local Governments

• Rural feeder roads. The 774 local government areas are constitutionally responsible for intra-LGA roads. A reliable 10–15 km feeder road from a farm cluster to the trunk road is the single highest-return investment in post-harvest loss reduction. LG Chairmen should be held publicly accountable for kilometres maintained per year.

• Market infrastructure and sanitation. Produce and livestock markets which come under LG jurisdiction need proper drainage, cold storage, weighing stations and veterinary inspection. A clean, standardised market doubles effective prices for smallholders by reducing spoilage.

• Agricultural extension at ward level. Rebuild ward-level extension officer networks co-financed by LG and state. One extension officer per 500–1,000 farm households is the FAO-recommended ratio; Nigeria currently averages one per 5,000–10,000.

2. Manufacturing (1.4% growth, 8.1% of GDP)

Foreign exchange access and stability have materially improved since the 2023 float unification, with FX liquidity restored and the naira stabilising in 2025.[13] The binding constraints are therefore now: energy cost, policy consistency, logistics, and the still-low capacity utilisation that left manufacturing at 1.4% real growth in 2025 with capacity utilisation around 55–57%.[12][13] The chart below tracks the shift.

Chart 5 — FX has meaningfully eased; the remaining binding constraints are energy cost, logistics, policy consistency and smuggled imports undercutting the 2026 tariff wall.

The 2026 tax reforms, the new National Industrial Policy, and the 127-item National List tariff restructure are genuinely useful pieces, but they need execution at all three tiers of government.

Federal Government

• Policy consistency and a ministerial manufacturing task force. The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria and NASSI have consistently identified policy reversals as the single largest drag on investment.[14] A one-year ministerial task force with binding authority across Finance, Industry, Customs and NMDPRA with published quarterly progress would break the inter-ministerial deadlock.

• Transparent qualification for the Economic Development Incentive (EDI). The EDI replaces Pioneer Status with a 5% annual capex tax credit for five years.[15] The Nigeria Revenue Service must publish clear, non-discretionary qualification criteria and a public register of beneficiaries to prevent the opacity that discredited Pioneer Status.

• Enforce the 127-item National List tariff structure. The reduced 0–10% tariffs on industrial inputs and raised 20–70% tariffs on finished imports only work if Customs controls smuggling through Seme, Idiroko, Jibiya, Maradi and the northern corridors.[16] Smuggling interdiction is as important as the tariff itself.

• Gas-to-industry pricing. Federal government, through NMDPRA and NUPRC, should formalise a ring-fenced domestic gas allocation to manufacturing clusters at transparent dollar-linked prices, with take-or-pay contracts that give both investors and operators planning certainty.

• National Single Window completion. Integrate all 14 port agencies into a single inspection window targeting 48-hour clearance for registered manufacturers. Apapa currently averages 14–21 days against 3–5 in Tema and Abidjan.

State Governments

• Embedded generation and cluster-level power. Under the Electricity Act 2023, states can now license their own generation and distribution. Lagos, Ogun, Rivers, Kano and Kaduna which host the bulk of industrial clusters should prioritise cluster-level 5–20MW gas-fired plants for industrial estates. Per-unit energy costs fall 40–60% versus individual factory diesel generators, and manufacturing margins move from negative to positive.

• Industrial estate rehabilitation. Agbara, Ikeja, Ota, Nnewi, Kano-Bompai, Kaduna, Port Harcourt industrial estates need rehabilitated internal roads, water, drainage and security. These are state-level deliverables. The current state of most estates is an embarrassment and actively repels investment.

• Harmonised state taxes and levies. The proliferation of state-level consumption, development and environmental levies undermines manufacturer profitability. States that have signed onto the federal tax harmonisation framework should publish consolidated rates and prosecute informal levy collection.

Local Governments

• Eliminate illegal levies on logistics corridors. Trucks moving finished goods and raw materials routinely face multiple informal tolls at LG boundaries and within markets. LG Chairmen must publish official rate schedules and prosecute local officials who extort operators. The Nigerian Shippers' Council can provide a reporting channel.

• Reliable municipal services for industrial estates. Solid waste, drainage and street lighting within industrial estates are municipal responsibilities. Ota and Agbara frequently lose production days to flooding that is fundamentally a local-government drainage failure.

3. Trade (1.8% growth, 17.4% of GDP)

Trade's 1.8% growth understates the problem because trade is 17.4% of GDP which is the second-largest sector after agriculture. Two structural issues cap growth. First, Nigeria connects to the world mostly through low-value raw materials: crude oil represents over 75% of exports and cocoa, sesame, cashew and other agricultural raw materials dominate non-oil exports. [6][7][8] The value cascade on cocoa alone illustrates the opportunity cost:

Chart 3 — Nigeria's 1.4 million metric tonnes of cocoa beans earned $1.3bn in 2020; the same volume processed into chocolate would have earned approximately $6.5bn.

Table 2 — Raw vs Processed Export Value: Where the Money Is Left on the Table

Source: RMRDC (2024), International Cocoa Organization, Nigerian Export Promotion Council estimates.

Secondly, Nigerian trade is dominated by nano and micro-traders which are estimated at over 40 million in the informal sector, whose fragmentation prevents scale, digitisation, automation and formal financing. The solution is not harassment but deliberate consolidation incentives.

Federal Government

• Pass and implement the Value Addition Bill. The Raw Materials Research and Development Council's proposed 30% value-addition-before-export bill is at first reading in the National Assembly. Passing it, with a five-year phased implementation for cocoa, cashew, sesame, solid minerals and leather, would force investment in domestic processing. [8] Ghana banned raw cocoa exports to Switzerland for similar reasons; Côte d'Ivoire mandates 50% local grinding.

• AfCFTA Rules of Origin enforcement. AfCFTA tariff concessions only benefit genuinely Made in Africa goods. [18] Nigeria must publish clear Rules of Origin guidance for exporters and prosecute Customs fraud on re-labelled Chinese imports passed off as Nigerian, otherwise AfCFTA becomes a back-door for dumping.

• Simplified exporter package. The Nigerian Export Promotion Council should publish a single-window exporter pack covering NEPC registration, Customs codes, Rules of Origin certification, standards (SON/NAFDAC), and payment/repatriation rules through the CBN. One portal, 14-day turnaround.

• Presumptive tax consolidation for micro-traders. Deliberately structure the presumptive tax regime under the 2026 tax reforms to incentivise consolidation: a trader above a certain turnover threshold enjoys lower effective rates as a registered company than as an individual. This pulls nano-traders into cooperatives, partnerships and registered SMEs.

State Governments

• Modernised markets with digital and formal infrastructure. Replace sprawling, unregulated open markets with planned retail zones, clusters of formal shops, common cold-chain, shared logistics, POS and fibre connectivity. Lagos Mile 12, Kano Dawanau, Onitsha Main Market could each be redeveloped under 25-year PPP concessions with protected trader relocation rights.

• State-level export facilitation desks. Each state should host a small export facilitation unit that helps SMEs meet SON and NAFDAC standards, access NEPC grants, and join state-coordinated container-sharing schemes so small exporters can fill part of a container instead of needing a full one.

• Cooperative consolidation incentives. States should actively promote trading cooperatives with 20–100 members that pool capital, share warehousing and negotiate wholesale. This both reduces the nano-trader count and creates entities large enough to access formal credit.

Local Governments

• Market governance. Markets are within LG jurisdiction. A single, transparent market-fee schedule replacing informal extraction would raise LG revenue while reducing trader cost. LGs should publish audited market accounts annually.

• Trader registration and business identification. LGs issuing simple Business Identification Numbers (BINs) to all market traders, linked to NIN and tax ID, would create the dataset needed for presumptive taxation, credit scoring, and eventual graduation to formal status.

4. Education (2.4% growth, 0.7% of GDP)

Education's 2.4% sector growth and 0.7% share of GDP understate its importance: this sector determines the productivity of every other sector 10–30 years out. The solution is structural, not incremental. Nigerian public basic education cannot recover under direct LG or state ministry management because the incentive structure rewards neither teachers nor administrators for outcomes. Community co-ownership, institutionalised through legally constituted trusts, is the reform that matters most.

The Trust-Based Ownership Model

The National School-Based Management Policy, approved by the National Council on Education, already anticipates this approach.[3][5] It establishes School-Based Management Committees (SBMCs) comprising parents, alumni, community leaders, teachers and youth representatives, with authority over school development planning, resource use, teacher monitoring and fund mobilisation. The challenge is not the framework, it is activation.

Chart 4 — The RISE Programme surveyed 6,188 public primary schools: 91% had formally established SBMCs, but fewer than 25% met the threshold for being active.

Where SBMCs functioned (in parts of Bauchi, Katsina, Sokoto and Niger), girls' enrolment rose by 41% in Sokoto and 15% in Katsina between 2008 and 2009, teacher absenteeism fell, and communities successfully mobilised their own funds for classroom blocks and girls' toilets.[4] The framework exists already, so it must now be institutionalised as legal trust ownership rather than advisory committees, with parallel reform for tertiary institutions under autonomous university trusts.

Federal Government

• **Amend the Universal Basic Education Act and National Universities Commission Act.**Convert SBMCs into legally incorporated trust boards with fiduciary authority, which powers for the appointment of head teachers (subject to professional qualifications), use of capitation grants, and acceptance of third-party funding (diaspora, alumni, corporate, faith-based). Convert federal universities from civil-service-like entities into autonomous trusts with governing councils that include meaningful alumni and academic representation.

• **Ring-fenced education financing.**Beyond TETFund (which only covers tertiary), establish a Basic Education Trust Fund financed by a hypothecated 1% levy on telecoms and banking net profits, channelled directly to state SUBEBs on a matching-grant basis tied to SBMC activity. Ghana's GETFund is a useful template.

• **Graduate service bonds.**Publicly subsidised medical, engineering, nursing, teaching and other prioritize courses’ graduates should face a 3–5 year in-country service obligation or repayment bond. Cuba, Ghana and South Africa have functional precedents.

• **Bilateral training compensation.**Negotiate agreements with the UK, US, Canada and Gulf states who are the most popular recipients of Nigeria's japa wave, whereby destination-country employers co-fund training pipelines here, modelled on the UK–Philippines healthcare compact.

State Governments

• **Operationalise SBMC trusts.**State Universal Basic Education Boards (SUBEBs) and Post-Primary Schools Boards must register SBMCs as trusts, issue governance manuals, and assess them quarterly. An SBMC that fails activity thresholds loses autonomy and reverts to SUBEB management; an active SBMC receives additional capitation.

• **Outcome-based teacher pay.**A minimum teacher salary benchmark linked to grade-level inflation is the floor; above that, SBMCs should have authority to pay performance bonuses from non-governmental funds. Competition for teachers between well-run SBMC schools and private schools raises the public standard.

• **Objective external assessment.**State ministries of education retain quality assurance, examinations, curriculum and inspection, as they no longer run schools operationally. This separation, standard in well-performing systems (England's Ofsted, Singapore's MOE), is what gives trust-ownership credibility.

• **State universities as trusts.**State-owned universities should be restructured under governing trusts with alumni, industry and academic representation, free to set salaries, raise endowments and source research grants. Government retains funding and regulatory oversight, not operational management.

Local Governments

• **Host SBMC registration and community mobilisation.**LGs are the level at which parents, traditional leaders and faith institutions actually live. LG education authorities should be the registrar and convenor of SBMCs, ensuring that elections are legitimate and that women, youth and persons with disabilities are represented.

• **School infrastructure maintenance.**Classroom block repairs, boreholes and toilets are LG-scale projects. Co-financing with SBMC-mobilised community contributions creates ownership and reduces unit costs relative to state or federal contracting.

5. Health (2.5% growth, 1.6% of GDP)

Human Health grew at 2.5% in 2025, against a population growth rate of approximately 2.4%. The diagnosis mirrors education: chronic underfunding, collapse of public delivery, and exodus of trained professionals. The reform architecture should be the trust-based public hospital governance, expanded compulsory health insurance, and a clear division of labour across the three tiers.

Hospital Trusts and Insurance Expansion

Public hospitals in Nigeria cannot compete for doctors, nurses and pharmacists under current civil-service pay scales. They lose staff steadily, first to private hospitals, then to Saudi Arabia, the UK and North America. Restructuring teaching hospitals, federal medical centres, state general hospitals and primary healthcare centres under governing trusts with authority to set remuneration, retain internally generated revenue, and accept corporate and philanthropic funding allows them to compete. It also creates the conditions for the National Health Insurance Authority Act 2022 to become operational reality rather than paper compliance.

Federal Government

• Amend hospital governance laws. Restructure all federal teaching hospitals and federal medical centres under autonomous hospital trusts, with governing boards that include medical faculty, patient representatives, alumni and professional bodies. The boards appoint chief medical directors on fixed performance terms; civil service tenure rules do not apply.

• Full disbursement of the Basic Health Care Provision Fund (BHCPF). The BHCPF is legally entitled to 1% of consolidated revenue for primary care; actual disbursement has been partial. The Ministry of Finance must publish monthly transfer data and the National Assembly must enforce compliance.

• Make NHIA enrolment automatic with tax filing. Integrate insurance enrolment with PAYE and presumptive tax filings so every formal-sector worker is auto-enrolled. State-level equity funds which can be co-financed federally to cover the informal sector and indigent.

• API-level local pharmaceutical manufacturing incentives. Combine the 2026 VAT zero-rating of medical supplies with 10-year CIT holidays for manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Nigeria imports 70%+ of APIs; even modest domestic capacity transforms drug security and trade balance.

• Graduate bonding and bilateral compensation. As with education 3–5 year service bonds for publicly trained doctors, nurses and other critical and more valuable degrees, and bilateral training-pipeline agreements with destination countries.

State Governments

• State hospital trust restructuring. State-owned teaching hospitals, general hospitals and specialist hospitals should be restructured as trusts mirroring the federal model. Lagos State University Teaching Hospital and University College Hospital Ibadan have partial precedents; the reform should be systematised.

• Primary care contracting. State ministries of health should contract, and not directly operate primary healthcare. PHCs run under local trust boards (see below) with state ministries handling regulation, licensing, drug supply and outcome audits.

• State health insurance schemes. Every state should have a functional State Health Insurance Scheme covering indigent, informal sector and state employees, financed by a mix of state subvention, employee contribution and federal equity fund transfers.

• Task-shifting authority. States should expand Community Health Extension Workers' (CHEWs) scope of practice under NMCN and MDCN guidance, enabling them to deliver 80% of primary care safely in areas without doctors.

Local Governments

• Primary Healthcare Centres under community trusts. The PHC level is constitutionally an LG function. Mirroring the SBMC model for education, PHCs should be governed by Primary Healthcare Management Committees with authority over local hiring, community financing and operational hours. The National Primary Health Care Development Agency provides the regulatory framework.

• Environmental health and preventive services. Sanitation, vector control, waste management, food vendor inspection and water quality are LG functions that prevent the disease burden PHCs then treat. These have collapsed in most LGs and need rebuilding as professionalised services.

• Community insurance mobilisation. LG health committees should drive enrolment of market associations, transport unions, farming cooperatives and religious groups into NHIA/state health insurance schemes, with group premium rates.

6. Public Administration (2.0% growth, 2.5% of GDP)

Public Administration grew at only 2.0%, which is a sign that government productivity is essentially static. The federal civil service is over-staffed in duplicative MDAs and under-staffed in delivery-critical agencies. State and LG civil services suffer the same condition at their scale. The reform agenda is institutional, not financial.

Federal Government

• Complete (revised) Oronsaye Report implementation. The 2011 Oronsaye Report identified over 200 MDAs with duplicated mandates for merger or abolition. Partial implementation began in 2024; completion would save 15–20% of personnel costs while reducing the bureaucratic touchpoints businesses face. A refresh might be necessary, but we need to look at the spirit behind it.

• Digitise recurring government services. Every service that goes digital like tax, permits, licences, land, pensions, procurement eliminates rent extraction and accelerates turnaround. The Nigeria Revenue Service's e-invoicing transition is a good example and should be the template for other agencies.

• Performance-based MDA funding. Link MDA budget allocations to published Key Performance Indicators verified by the Bureau of Public Service Reforms and the Auditor-General, with public reporting and National Assembly oversight.

State Governments

• Replicate Oronsaye at state level. Most states carry 40–60 MDAs with overlapping mandates, often creating ministerial positions for political settlement rather than service delivery. State Oronsaye-equivalent reviews would release fiscal space for capital investment.

• Fiscal transparency and open contracting. State governments that publish contracts, budgets and audits openly (Edo, Kaduna and Lagos have precedents) attract better investment and reduce corruption. Every state should adopt Open Contracting Data Standards.

• State civil service meritocracy. Competitive recruitment, published promotion criteria and tenure protection for permanent secretaries and heads of service as opposed to the practice of wholesale replacement with each governor stabilises state capacity. Promotions should be linked to vacancies and not just tenures.

Local Governments

• Genuine LG financial autonomy. The Supreme Court's 2024 ruling ordering direct federal allocation to LGs must be fully implemented by all states. State Joint Local Government Accounts have historically been mechanisms for state capture of LG funds; ending this is the single most important institutional reform at LG level.

• Performance league tables. LGs should be benchmarked annually on service delivery metrics like roads maintained, PHC utilisation, school attendance, market cleanliness with results published. Citizen-facing scorecards create political accountability where elections have been weak.

7. The Responsibility Matrix at a Glance

The reforms set out above are summarised in the table below. The strength of this approach is that it refuses to let any one tier of government hide behind the others. Federal legislation creates the framework; states deliver complementary infrastructure and regulation; local governments build the citizen-facing services.

Table 3 — Tier-of-government responsibility matrix across the six laggard sectors.

8. The Cross-Cutting Imperatives

Reading the sectoral data together, the fastest-growing sectors like Finance (14.5%), ICT (6.9%), Transportation & Storage (16.9%), Oil & Gas (8.5%), Water (10.0%) share three characteristics: they have been liberalised, they have credible private-sector workarounds to public failure, or they operate under regulatory bodies (CBN, NCC) with genuine independence (a couple of exceptions). Laggards like Manufacturing, Agriculture, Education, Health, Public Administration, Trade are the sectors where state execution capacity, security and policy stability matter most (a couple of exceptions).

Four cross-cutting conditions determine whether everything in this article becomes real:

1. Security reform. State police, regulated forest guards and agricultural-corridor security are foundational. Without them, agriculture, rural manufacturing and rural health all fail.

2. Electricity reform. The Electricity Act 2023 is the most important economic reform of the decade. State licensing, embedded generation, cluster-level industrial power, cost reflective tariff structure and a functioning service-level regime for DisCos determine whether manufacturing, health and education can operate.

3. Policy stability. Manufacturers and investors repeatedly identify sudden reversals tariff changes, FX rules, tax interpretations as the single largest deterrent. A binding commitment to 36-month policy horizons on industrial, trade and FX policy, with published consultation protocols, would reprice Nigerian risk.

4. Institutional separation. Schools run by community trusts, hospitals run by hospital trusts, universities run by governing trusts, regulators independent of operators. This is the structural reform Nigeria has been deferring since independence. It is no longer deferrable.

Nigeria's laggard sectors will not recover through federal policy alone. They will recover when the Federal Government creates the enabling legal and fiscal architecture, when State Governments deliver the power, land administration, industrial estates and regulatory quality that sit at their tier, when Local Governments rebuild the markets, feeder roads, PHCs and SBMC-registered schools that sit at theirs, and when institutional separation like trust ownership in education and health, regulatory independence in the economy breaks the doom loop of direct government management. The 2026 tax reforms, the new National Industrial Policy, the AGROW project, the Electricity Act and the Value Addition Bill under consideration provide the scaffolding. [11][15][16][18] Execution across all three tiers is now the only remaining question.

References

[1] National Bureau of Statistics / NESG Research, Table 1: Sectoral Performance in Nigeria (2025) — Contribution to GDP Growth, Sectoral Growth, and Share of GDP.

[2] Presidential New Year Address, 2026 Marks the Beginning of a More Robust Phase of Economic Growth, State House, Abuja, 1 January 2026, statehouse.gov.ng.

[3] Federal Ministry of Education, National School-Based Management Policy (NSBMP), 2015, education.gov.ng.

[4] RISE Programme, School-Based Management Committees (SBMCs) and How to Study Them: A Methodological Review of a RISE Research Project, riseprogramme.org, 2022.

[5] Kwashabawa, B.B., School-Based Management Committee Strategies, Community Participation and Effectiveness of Basic Schools in North-West Zone, Nigeria, University of Ilorin / SSRN, 2017.

[6] Raw Materials Research and Development Council (RMRDC), The Urgency of 30% Value Addition to Nigeria's Raw Material Exports, 360.rmrdc.gov.ng, 2024.

[7] Businessday NG, Africa's Trade Paradox: A Tale of Exporting Raw and Importing Processed, businessday.ng, 18 June 2024.

[8] RMRDC, Achieving a Stouter Nigerian Economy with 30% Export Value Addition, 360.rmrdc.gov.ng, 17 December 2024.

[9] World Food Programme and UN estimates on Nigerian food insecurity 2026 outlook, as cited in Nigeria's Agriculture Outlook: Production Trends, Challenges and Expectations for 2026, AgriFocus Africa, 23 December 2025.

[10] U.S. Department of Commerce, Nigeria — Agriculture Sector, Country Commercial Guide, trade.gov, September 2025.

[11] World Bank, Nigeria: World Bank Approves Project to Expand Agricultural Value Chains and Jobs — $500m IDA credit for AGROW Project, worldbank.org, 30 March 2026.

[12] The Sun, The Constraints of Manufacturing Sector, thesun.ng, 4 January 2026.

[13] The Nation, Can Nigeria First Policy Fire Up Sluggish Manufacturing Sector?, thenationonlineng.net, 19 May 2025.

[14] The Guardian, Manufacturers Seek Policy Stability, Cohesion in 2026, guardian.ng, 31 December 2025.

[15] Nigeria Advocacy and Legal Task Force (NALTF), New 2026 Tax Reforms Set to Bolster Nigerian Manufacturing Sector, naltf.gov.ng, 12 January 2026.

[16] Economy Post / Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE), CPPE: Nigeria's 2026 Fiscal Measures to Spur Industrial Growth, Test Import-Based Businesses, economypost.ng, April 2026.

[17] WorldStage News, Manufacturing: Accelerated Adoption of Technology — Nigeria Macroeconomic Outlook 2026, worldstagenews.com, April 2026.

[18] Nairametrics, The AfCFTA Rules of Origin Will Create Opportunities for Private Sector Through Value Addition, nairametrics.com, 24 July 2021.

[19] Brookings Institution, Quantifying the Impact on Nigeria of the African Continental Free Trade Area, brookings.edu, 9 March 2022.

[20] MSME Africa / National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria's Manufacturing Sector Generates N1.17 Trillion VAT Revenue in 2025, msmeafricaonline.com, April 2026.