Fact Check: Is Lagos truly Africa’s 3-biggest economy as being claimed by APC

At the last Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) conference held in Lagos, the All Progressives Congress (APC) Vice Presidential Candidate, Kashim Shettima made the assertion that Lagos state is the third largest economy in Africa, attributing this to the foundation laid by his principal, Bola Ahmed Tinubu when he was governor of the state.

“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.

Official data shows that, though the state is Nigeria’s biggest economy, it is not among the top five economies on the 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.

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Lagos state is Nigeria’s biggest economy and was responsible for 15.3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021.

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.

Tinubu is credited with changing the way taxes and levies are collected in the state, which has seen its IGR steadily increase.

But the claim that the state has the third largest economy in Africa is false.

According to official documents, Lagos’s GDP was 26.587 trillion naira in 2021 (US$75.965 billion at the time).

That figure represents about 15.3 percent of Nigeria’s GDP, which stood at 173.527 trillion naira during the same period.

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In terms of percentage contribution to the national GDP, the 2021 figure was the lowest contribution by the state over a five-year period between 2017 and 2021. The document cited the COVID-19 pandemic as a key reason for the decline.

According to the report, the country’s GDP was the largest on the continent in 2021 at US$440 billion. The value of Lagos State for the same year was US$75.965 billion.

This places it behind the economies of five countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria, South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya and Ghana) and three in North Africa (Egypt, Algeria and Morocco).

If Lagos State were to be deducted from the national value, Nigeria would simply slump to the third position in Africa behind South Africa and Egypt.

Meanwhile, the state’s GDP remains larger than that of West African neighbours Niger, Benin, Togo, Chad, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Gambia put together.