The nation’s plan to rebase the Gross Domestic Product figures next year may boost the size of its economy by as much as 60 per cent, leapfrogging South Africa as the continent’s largest nation in terms of total wealth, Renaissance Capital Limited has said.

Nigeria might see its economy measured at between $384bn and $424bn in 2014, Bloomberg quoted a London-based global chief economist at RenCap, Charles Robertson, as saying, in an e-mailed on Wednesday.

That would compare to about $370bn for the South Africa’s economy, he added.

Nigeria is updating its GDP base year to 2010 to give a better indication of the size and composition of its economy.

The country’s GDP is currently based on production patterns in 1990. The schedule for release of the new GDP data has been delayed several times this year with the figure set to be published by the National Bureau of Statistics in February.

“The effect could be dramatic,” said Robertson. “Because a national census of business has not been done for 20 years, we expect a big rise in the number of businesses that the NBS can measure.”

The data might mean that Nigeria’s growth rate could slow to five per cent or six per cent, from the current seven per cent annual rate, he said.

Even a revised per capita GDP from $1,700 to an estimated $2,400 will lag behind the South Africa’s at $6,800, according to Robertson.

Nigeria has about 170 million people while South Africa has a population of 53 million.

Nigeria’s economic growth over the past decade had not been inclusive enough and had fostered inequality in the West African nation, the Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said last month.

“This will not be easy to explain to the population,” Robertson said. “Rebasing does not mean Nigerians are better off – it just means they are better off than official statistics previously indicated.”

South Africa is the site of Africa’s biggest stock and exchanges and its electricity generation capacity is 10 times that of Nigeria.

Source: Punch