According to the World Bank Nigeria currently ranks no. 22 based on Nominal GDP in the world. Despite this we as a Nation are not performing at an optimal level because we are estimated as using 70% of our economic capabilities. Given this seemingly high rating our GDP per capita is ranked 122 in the world, and this is a measure of goods and services produced within the country this therefore makes a country highly dependent on imports and it won’t lead us to an optimum economic performance.

The desire to perform optimally can be achieved if our economy is modelled to be manufacturing and export driven; countries which are great examples of this are the United States of America and China. They are currently ranked as the top economies in the world and despite their high population rates they have strong GDP per capita ratings. One major step needed to take to become an exporting country is to get our refineries up and running as petroleum is currently a major input of our income. The refining of petroleum in Nigeria will be a big step as the price of the other variants (diesel, tar, kerosene, gas) gotten from it will be greatly reduced and this will aid the manufacturing process in companies.

Another factor we need to look at is the issue of power, China and America has invested in alternative sources of power such as coal, solar, waste, wind, nuclear, natural gas and hydro. Nigeria currently relies on hydro as its major source of electricity generation and this is a big problem as it is never stable and companies rely on power generation sets to effectively run their operations. China in 2014 produced 550TW hours of electricity generation while US produced 4093TW hours, Nigeria’s production of electricity stands at 6500MW hours which is a long way off. If Nigeria can effectively use alternative sources of power as mentioned earlier the amount of goods and services produced within the country will be greatly increased.

Stable electricity and the refinery of petroleum are the key areas which Nigeria needs to provide before we can be a top 20 economy and perform optimally if we do not tackle these areas we won’t achieve our goal.