HOW NIGERIA BECAME NO.1 COUNTRY WITH BEST ECONOMY IN AFRICA ON 9th APRIL 2014

Crude oil spills from a pipeline
in northwestern Nigeria (Reuters/
Afolabi Sotunde)
Something strange happened in
Nigeria on Sunday: The economy
nearly doubled, racking up
hundreds of billions of dollars,
ballooning to the size of the
Polish and Belgian economies,
and breezing by the South
African economy to become
Africa's largest. As days go, it
was a good one.
It was, in fact, a miracle borne
of statistics: It had been 24
years since Nigerian authorities
last updated their approach to
calculating gross domestic
product (GDP), a process known
as "rebasing" that wealthy
countries typically carry out
every five years. When the
Nigerian government finally did
it this week, the country's GDP—
the market value of all finished
goods and services produced in a
country—soared to $510 billion.
To celebrate the occasion,
Nigeria's National Bureau of
Statistics released a pretty
entertaining PowerPoint
presentation—an admixture of
sober economic pronouncements
and clip art. It includes this
depiction of the long road to
$510 billion:
National Bureau of Statistics
Nigeria's overnight
transformation raises two
distinct but interconnected
questions. First: What do we
miss about countries when we
don't have accurate economic
data about them—and what are
the practical implications of that
blindness?
In computing its GDP all these
years, Nigeria, incredibly, wasn't
factoring in booming sectors like
film and telecommunications.
The Nigerian movie industry,
Nollywood , generates nearly
$600 million a year and employs
more than a million people,
making it the country's second-
largest employer after
agriculture. As for the telecom
industry, consider that there are
now some 120 million mobile-
phone subscribers in Nigeria,
out of a population of 170
million. Nigeria and South Africa
are the largest mobile markets
in sub-Saharan Africa, and cell-
phone use has been exploding in
the country:
Nigerian Communications
Commission (Datawrapper)
Incorporating the film and
telecom industries into Nigeria's
GDP made a huge difference in
the services sector, rendering
the country's economy not just
bigger but more diversified.