As preparations for its 32nd Summit continue to gather momentum, the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), a leading private sector-led policy advocacy and think tank organization, has expressed its readiness to engage the federal and state governments, development finance institutions, and private infrastructure investors in a serious conversation on what it would take to build the physical and digital infrastructure of a distributed Nigerian economy and how to finance and maintain it sustainably.
The group gave this hint in a statement issued on Tuesday by its Head, Strategic Communication and Advocacy, Ayanyinka Ayanlowo, based on its concerns about the current inequality in the nation’s economic prosperity and the need to address it for the purposes of inclusive and shared prosperity in the country.
The NESG stated that Nigeria’s economic geography currently reflected a story of striking inequality with a handful of states and cities such as Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Port Harcourt concentrating the bulk of formal economic activity, financial flows, and investment, while vast swathes of Nigeria’s territory, home to tens of millions of people and endowed with agricultural land, mineral resources, and cultural wealth, remained economically marginalised.
It lamented that the result reflected a nation whose aggregate statistics obscure profound internal disparities.
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According to the group, at the 32nd Nigerian Economic Summit with the theme ‘Growth that Works: Delivering Jobs, Productivity and Shared Prosperity’ the Scale Nigeria sub-theme makes the case that genuine national prosperity requires the deliberate distribution of economic activity, not as a matter of political equity alone, but as a strategic economic imperative. Concentrated growth limits Nigeria’s overall competitive potential. Distributed growth unlocks it.
The NESG clarified: “When economic activity is geographically concentrated, it creates a cascade of inefficiencies. Infrastructure in dominant urban centres becomes overloaded and expensive, Lagos’s traffic gridlock, for instance, is estimated to cost the economy hundreds of billions of naira annually in lost productive time. Meanwhile, infrastructure elsewhere atrophies from underuse and underinvestment.
“Labour migrates from productive regions to economic hubs, depleting the human capital of subnational economies that could otherwise develop competitive specialisations. Markets in remote and peri-urban areas remain thin and underdeveloped, limiting the scope for local enterprise and leaving consumers dependent on expensive, long-distance supply chains.
“Scaling Nigeria’s growth is therefore not simply a redistribution exercise, it is a strategy for increasing the total productive capacity of the nation. Every state that develops a functional economy is a market, a production zone, and a talent pool that adds to rather than drains from Nigeria’s national potential.
“Nigeria’s 36 states and Federal Capital Territory are not economically uniform. They differ in climate, soil types, mineral endowments, cultural industries, human capital profiles, and proximity to regional and international markets. A growth strategy that treats them as identical will fail; one that identifies and builds on the specific comparative advantages of each subnational economy can succeed.
“Kebbi and Niger states have extraordinary rice production potential. Plateau state can develop into a high-value horticulture and cold-chain hub. Cross River has tourism and cocoa. Kano is a historic commercial and manufacturing centre with proximity to Sahel and West African markets. Ondo and Delta have solid minerals and timber. These are not conjectures, they are latent economic realities waiting for the enabling conditions: infrastructure, investment, policy, and market linkages.
“One of the most powerful tools for distributing economic growth is the development of regional value chains focused on production and processing systems that link multiple states and communities within a geographic corridor. A regional value chain for agriculture, for example, might connect smallholder farmers in a producing state to processing facilities in an adjacent state, to logistics networks leading to consumption markets, to export terminals on the coast”, the group added.
It stated that this year’s summit would explore how government, the private sector, and development finance can collaborate to build regional value chain infrastructure including road and rail connectivity, warehousing and logistics, power and water provision, and market information systems that enables subnational economies to participate effectively in national and international markets.
The group maintained that for states to attract investment and develop their economies, they must offer competitive enabling environments, which means efficient land administration systems, clear and consistent regulatory frameworks, functioning dispute resolution mechanisms, investor-friendly attitudes in state bureaucracies, and proactive industrial development policies.
It further stated: “NES #32 will examine the subnational investment climate across Nigeria’s states, identifying best practices, persistent barriers, and reform opportunities. State governments will be challenged to compete for investment not through unsustainable fiscal concessions but through the quality of their governance, the competence of their institutions, and the strategic intelligence of their development planning.
“Ultimately, the geographic distribution of economic activity depends on infrastructure: roads and bridges that connect markets, rail networks that reduce logistics costs, power that enables production, digital connectivity that integrates communities into the national and global economy, and water systems that support agriculture and manufacturing”, the NESG added.
