•Pate: Reforms attract Pharma investors, add 4m Nigerians to health insurance

The Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) has reviewed the impacts of President Bola Tinubu’s administration’s economic reforms and declared that the reforms have grown the service sector and left the real sector, especially manufacturing and agriculture struggling for survival.

The Director General of LCCI, Dr. Chinyere Almona, said that two years into the administration, Nigeria has undergone significant policy shifts – most notably, the removal of fuel subsidies, exchange rate liberalisation, and attempts to shore up public revenues through tax reforms.

Almona, who assessed the macroeconomic impacts of these reforms, said that Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 3.4 per cent in 2024 from 2.74 per cent in 2023 was “driven by the services sector, which expanded by 5.37 per cent and accounted for over 57 per cent of GDP.

“This growth, while positive, has been uneven as manufacturing and agriculture sectors have continued to struggle due to high production costs, insecurity, and logistical inefficiencies, limiting business competitiveness.”

She said that these reform measures “have also imposed short-term hardships on businesses and households, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which remain the backbone of the Nigerian economy.”

According to her, Nigeria’s current macroeconomic landscape reflects a nation in transition.

She said: “On one hand, the government’s economic reform agenda – centered on the Renewed Hope mantra – has attracted some investor interest, revived engagement with multilateral institutions, and improved public finance efficiency.

“But on the other hand, inflationary pressures have reached historic highs, driven by high energy costs, food insecurity, forex instability, and weak industrial productivity.

“There are also growing concerns about policy coordination. While monetary authorities target inflation, fiscal policy expands through borrowing and recurrent expenditure. This divergence has weakened the impact of economic interventions and eroded investor confidence.”

Almona also added that inflation, which stood at 23.7 per cent in April 2025, has remained a critical challenge.

According to her, “fuel subsidy removal and foreign exchange (FX) liberalisation have increased prices, especially for transportation and food.

“The removal of fuel subsidy alone freed up an estimated $7.5 billion annually, but tripled fuel costs. While this improves the fiscal outlook, it increases business operating expenses, particularly logistics, agro-processing, and retail SMEs,” Almona said.

The LCCI also said that “businesses still face challenges accessing forex for imports, and many continue to price goods defensively due to volatility concerns” in spite of the FX reforms and unification of the exchange rate that have improved transparency, boosted confidence, and enabled the Naira to stabilise around N1,600/$ and external reserves rising above $37 billion.

It added that public debt has grown to N144.67 trillion, with debt service still consuming over 90 per cent of federal revenue and advised that the government must consider cheaper sources of debt and deploy debt into the real economy to subsidise production.

The LCCI acknowledged that Tinubu’s bold macroeconomic reforms, which are aimed at correcting long-standing structural distortions, have come with significant short-term socio-economic costs but offered the potential for long-term macroeconomic stability and inclusive growth if they are implemented effectively and supported by strong institutional backing.

Meanwhile, the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof.  Ali Pate, has said the Tinubu administration’s reforms in healthcare are yielding results, with over four million Nigerians newly enrolled in the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and fresh momentum toward ending the country’s reliance on imported pharmaceuticals.

Speaking on Channels Television, yesterday, Pate  noted that President Tinubu’s administration is actively addressing the long-standing de-industrialisation of Nigeria’s pharmaceutical sector.

This, he said, is being tackled through the Presidential Initiative for Unlocking the Healthcare Value Chain (PVAC) an ambitious plan aimed at transforming Nigeria into a regional hub for health products by boosting local production and encouraging private-sector participation.

He said: “For decades, Nigeria has been systematically de-industrialised. We were dependent on imports of the most basic things like generic pharmaceuticals, which we could have produced,” Pate said, highlighting policy inconsistencies that stifled local manufacturers.

He pointed to recent reforms, including an executive order to reduce tariffs on raw materials and manufacturing equipment, as measures designed to correct the course. He also highlighted the ‘Nigeria First’ policy, which promotes local content and encourages Nigerians to patronise homegrown pharmaceutical products.

“Recently, we commissioned a manufacturing plant in Sagamu in Ogun State, and several others have now started setting up, one here in Abuja is able to produce 600 million test kits.”

Pate noted that two years ago, there was no local manufacturer of rapid diagnostic kits in Sub-Saharan Africa, but Nigeria now has local producers a major turning point in the country’s healthcare capacity.

In a related development, Pate also revealed that four million Nigerians have been enrolled in the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in the past two years marking a sharp acceleration in coverage compared to the previous two decades.

“In almost 25 years of health insurance in Nigeria, there were 16 million enrollees when this administration came in less than a million a year. But in two years, four million Nigerians have enrolled,” he said.

The minister attributed this progress to the expansion of the Basic Healthcare Provision Fund, which now supports hundreds of thousands of poor and vulnerable citizens particularly women and children across the country.

He said the Ministry of Health is working closely with state health insurance authorities to reform and modernise the NHIS, adding that if the same momentum had been sustained in earlier years.