Nigeria has receded, Emefiele declares

Godwin Emefiele, Governor Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has said the country political leadership need to do more to bring the country back from the brinks.
Emefiele, who spoke at the Senate on Wednesday while undergoing screening for his second term appointment noted that "the country has, no doubt, receded.”
According to him, his recent journey to an Asian country opened his eyes to the fact that Nigeria has not made the kind of progress it ought to have made in the past 50 years
“I entered that country happy but I came out of the country sad. Sad because I could see the level of development that the country has achieved over the last 50 years.
''I cast my mind back and look at my country Nigeria and asked: what have we achieved? This is what gives me the push that at my age of 57, I saw this country when it was good. I am looking at the country today and I am saying ‘I don’t want to say it is bad but I want to say that we have a lot of work to do because the country has, no doubt, receded.”
Emefiele expressed worries about the country’s population growth rate without viable economic base as well as serious propensity for improvement.“We just came back from the IMF/World Bank programme in April. And in the World Bank’s/IMF’s World Economic Outlook, Nigeria is positioned as a country whose population will grow and rise to over 425 million people by 2050. That will present Nigeria as a country with the third largest population in the world after China and India, and indeed surpassing the United States of America in population.
“I worry and I do think that we all should worry that a lot of work needs to be done to make sure that we are able to put in place policies that will make life good for these 425 million people when we are the third largest population in the world.”He expressed optimism that the CBN might be able to reverse the trend. “We from the CBN, from the monetary policy side, have come to the realisation that using the instrumentality of the Anchor Borrowers Programme where access to credit is being provided to our masses all over the country, will be a way to generate employment and boost economic activity amongst our rural population.”