Sanyade Okoli outlines how coordinated macroeconomic management and decisive action on electricity could unlock competitiveness and investment.
Nigeria's economic leadership is increasingly unified around a central objective: stabilising the macroeconomic environment to attract investment and accelerate growth. For Sanyade Okoli, Special Adviser to the President on Finance and the Economy, the country's progress hinges on a shared commitment across fiscal and monetary authorities.
"I think it's a shared sense of purpose," she says. "There's a common understanding that the only way we're going to be able to lift people out of poverty, the way Mr. President wants, is to be able to attract investment, and for you to attract investment, you need a level of macroeconomic stability. There's no way we're going to be able to achieve macroeconomic stability if the fiscal and monetary aren't working together, especially because it's such a balancing act."
That alignment, she notes, is already yielding results. "A little earlier the honourable minister of finance and coordinating minister of the economy was commenting about the fact that in the last couple of years we managed to achieve what is ordinarily difficult which is to both drive growth and to be able to bring down inflation."
For Okoli, this dual achievement is proof that coordinated policy can deliver meaningful outcomes. "That alone speaks of alignment and that has to keep going forward because the Central Bank, of course, still has the desire to reduce inflation further but then collectively we all recognize the need to grow the economy and grow the economy in the way that creates decent jobs, and as I mentioned, lift people out of poverty. So, we must continue to work together."
Yet even with improved macroeconomic coordination, Nigeria's structural bottlenecks remain a drag on productivity. Okoli is unequivocal about the single most transformative lever available to the country.
"If I had a magic wand, I'd sort out the electricity," she says. "Because that for me would be the magic bullet because it is cross cutting in terms of, you know, reducing the cost of doing business and improving the lives."
She argues that reliable power is central to competitiveness. "It's not lost on us that if we're talking about increasing growth and increasing productivity, we must achieve that. And we believe that if we achieve that, you know, the benefits are multi-dimensional and serves to ensure that Nigerian goods and services become more attractive, and more competitive."
With the Electricity Act now enabling states to generate, transmit and distribute power, the sector is entering a new phase - one that will require significant capital and collaboration.
"You see to kickstart the electricity value chain together with so many other value chains, it really is going to have to be a partnership between government and the private sector," Okoli explains. "A few months ago, government issued bonds of a trillion naira to make payments to the generation company to bring some liquidity into the sector."
But she is clear that this is only the beginning. "We know that that's not enough, we are going to have to attract investment across the value chain for us to be to not only increase generation, but the transmission which everybody recognizes has some bottlenecks that need to be addressed and also with the discos then making the necessary investments to reduce the losses etc."
For Nigeria, the path to accelerated growth is becoming more defined: coordinated macroeconomic policy, structural reform, and targeted investment in productivity‑enhancing sectors. The challenge now lies in execution and in sustaining the alignment that Okoli believes is essential for lifting millions into prosperity.