Nigeria may be next African BRIC ' Okonjo-Iweala

The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said on Monday that Nigeria would soon join the BRIC countries, which are all deemed to be at a similar stage of newly advanced economic development.The BRIC is an acronym for the Brazilian, Russian, Indian and Chinese economies.Okonjo Iweala told the British Broadcasting Corporation in an interview that the country had the fundamentals to be one of the BRIC countries.The minister said, We are the largest country in terms of population, we are growing at a very respectable rate of seven per cent and better for the past couple of years, and we have got both the natural resource base and also the human resource base to be able to do better.And I think that when we take care of several of the constraints that are holding our economy back; for instance, we have constraints of power, which is holding our industry back; when we solve those problems, we are going to be in the low double digits and that will parachute Nigeria into the BRIC.Okonjo-Iweala added that it was estimated that by 2050, Nigeria might have the third-largest population in the world, noting that it was for these reasons that President Goodluck Jonathan had started focusing on a programme that would transform the economy.
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