NIGERIANS, THEIR NEIGHBOURS grumble, think of their country as the Texas of Africa, where everything is bigger and better. On size, at least, they are largely right. By land mass Nigeria is about as big as France and Germany combined, dwarfing many other African countries. After a recalculation of its GDP in 2014 it was found to have overtaken South Africa to become the continent’s biggest economy. Its population, too, at an estimated 183m, is the largest of any African country. And it is growing so rapidly that the United Nations Population Division expects it to overtake America’s by 2050.
Numbers such as these play a big part in getting people excited about Nigeria as a potentially vast consumer market and investment destination. There is just one snag: they are almost certainly wrong. Many of the figures about the country that are making the rounds are patently absurd, and few more so than the population statistics, for an obvious reason: allocations of revenue from the central government and voting power in the capital depend on population estimates, so every region has an incentive to bump up its own count.
In...
from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1H14Yoy
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