The foregoing explains why the country can boost her earnings in the domestic market and earn more foreign exchange accruals from increased international trade through our numerous processed agricultural produce and minerals as well as create jobs and improve on workers’ technical competences. The capability to produce semi-finished and finished products through value-addition activities will enable Nigeria to compete better in the international markets and make it possible for the country to earn substantially more foreign exchange leveraging on the current ECOWAS trade protocols and African Continental Trade Agreement (AFCTA). This explains why a country’s earnings from taxes, duties and levies can be boosted by more industrialisation and enhanced production of value-added products they produce and sell in the domestic and export markets. Such companies are able to earn a premium for their extra efforts on their processing and finishing operations. Therefore, it is safe to imagine that companies that produce value added products from the raw produce will earn substantially more revenues than those entities that produce primary raw materials. What they pay will in turn be dependent on the revenues that accrue to them. Producing processed goods from these raw agricultural and crude mineral resources can provide government an avenue to earn revenues through various taxes, duties and levies that the producers will pay into the coffers of government. This process will add value to agricultural produce and mineral resources, notably crude oil, gas, crude metal ores, precious stones and gem stones. And, in order to ensure that our economy grows beyond the present growth trajectory and move the economy into the matured stage of development, the focus of government and the private investors should be on value-addition industrialisation process. These are activity sectors consistent with secondary and third stages of development. At present, the leading sectors of the Nigerian economy, as established in a recent macro-economic analytical work, throws up nine leading activity sectors, namely construction, oil refining, rail transportation, pipelines, textile, apparel and furniture, trade (wholesale and retail), utilities (power supply, water supply and waste management), agriculture (crops, fisheries, livestock and forestry) and agro-allied manufacturing. Changes in the economy came through changes in private investment, public policies and the civil war which altered the directions of investment by setting up arbitrary demands and changing the condition of supply. And since the 1970s crude oil took over with trade and ICT now dominating. This third stage is inter-twined with the second stage to produce the next stage which sets the condition for take-off to advance development in which the secondary production becomes the leading contributor to GDP, employment and income with substantial export of semi-finished and finished products.Īt independence in 1960 and before crude oil mining in the 1970s, primitive agriculture was the leading sector.
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The tertiary stage is characterised by production activities made up of service activities like transportation, communications, trade, hotels and restaurants, finance, insurance, real estate, housing, business services and tourism as well as high-level government operations. This is followed by the second stage in which outputs of the primary production process are transformed into higher valued products through processing and low-level manufacturing augmented with provision of utilities and construction activities. And, every country follows this established process of development starting from agricultural production and mining operations using primitive technologies based mainly on human labour and rudimentary tools as capital items. It has been established in the development literature that the development process comes in stages starting from the primitive stage to mass consumption stage.