Give agriculture and manufacturing more policy attention now
Ken Opalo
By
Ken Opalo
| May 02, 2026
The 2026 National Economic survey revealed a mixed picture about the economy. The good news is we are still growing, at 4.6 per cent last year. This was a deceleration from the 4.7 per cent the previous year, and a fall from above 5 per cent that we averaged in preceding years.
To be clear, 4.6 per cent growth is nothing to sneer about. Any growth is better than no growth. And it is commendable that we continue to grow at a rate higher than our population growth, which means per capita income will keep rising.
However, it is also important to understand where we are underperforming. Here, it is worth focusing on two important sectors of agriculture and manufacturing. While the two sectors only make up 39.5 per cent, they are important engines of our overall economic growth. Together, they account for 30 per cent of the formal jobs in the private sector. Both sectors absorb a significant share of the 18.1 million (83.8 per cent of total workers) in the informal sector. It follows that as the two sectors go, so does the economy.
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With that in mind, it is worrying that the two sectors have seen their growth rates decelerate substantially over the last few years. In recent years, growth in agriculture peaked at 7.1 per cent in 2023. It then decreased to 4.3% in 2025 and then down to 2.8% in 2025. The manufacturing sector has essentially flatlined since peaking at 7.3% post-Covid growth in 2021. Last year the sector grew by 2%.
These numbers call into question the extent to which government policy rhetoric is matched by actual implementation. The current administration has been touting its investments in the agricultural sector to boost farmer productivity, and to facilitate agro-processing.
While not fully on board with industrialisation as a dominant strategy, the government has also been singing about job creation and boosting manufacturing as a share of total output. Yet these are the numbers we have.
How did we end up here? The chatter from many private sector players in agriculture and manufacturing is that the government is still far from clearing the stage of obstacles to their thriving. This is not necessarily out of malice, or the usual problems of corruption (although those are real and deserve serious attention).
An abiding challenge for these sectors is lack of proactive policy attention anchored on iterative problem-solving. The point here is that there are good intentions within government, but the good attention is not organised in a manner to optimise what the individuals concerned are trying to do.
There is only so much you can get out of conferences, international certifications, superficial stakeholder engagements and studies.
At some point we have to invest in the real drivers of output. How can we increase productivity in the two sectors? What regulatory bottlenecks must go? How can we lower costs of input? How do we support emergence of productive value chains? And how can we solve financing problems in the two sectors?
-The writer is a professor at Georgetown University