A report by AFP fact check has debunked the claim by some government officials that Lagos state, Nigeria’s former capital and economic hub is the third biggest economy in Africa.
Recall that recently, during the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) conference in Lagos on August 22, Vice Presidential Candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Kashim Shettima had echoed the assertion.
“Lagos is the third largest economy in Africa,” Shettima said at the annual general meeting of the Nigerian Bar Association in Lagos on August 22, 2022.
He made the comments while listing Tinubu’s achievements when he was state governor between 1999 and 2007.
While official records actually confirmed that the State is Nigeria’s biggest economy, it is not among the top five economies on the African continent.
True, the state tops the list of the best African cities for tech startups and is home to Nigeria’s busiest seaport and the country offices of tech giants like Google and Microsoft, World Bank data shows Lagos State is not Africa’s third-largest economy – whether it is subtracted from or counted as part of Nigeria’s national gross domestic product.
According to a report by AFP, figures from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed that the state had the highest internally generated revenue (IGR) in 2020, with 419 billion naira (US$1.1 billion at the time) collected in taxes and dues. That amount is more than triple the revenue of the second-best state, Rivers, which collected 118 billion naira during the same period.
