Nigeria
187
Remittance and Emigration Trends As previously noted, remittances have become Nigeria’s second most significant source of foreign exchange. Their volume exceeds all non-oil receipts in the country, including ODA, FDI (as figure 7.1 depicts), portfolio inflows, and non-oil exports.
Volume of Remittances An estimated 65 percent of total official remittance flows to Sub-Saharan Africa and 2 percent of the global formal remittance flows go to Nigeria (Orozco 2003; Hernández-Coss and Bun 2007). From a relatively meager $1.18 billion in 1999, remittance inflows to the country increased to an estimated $9.98 billion by 2008—second only to oil receipts as the country’s prime foreign exchange earner. As a share of gross domestic product (GDP), migrant remittances grew steadily from 0.4 percent in 1996 to about 7.5 percent in 2006 (CBN 2007). The Central Bank estimates that, as of the end of 2007, total remittance flows to Nigeria stood at about $17.95 billion, about 70 percent higher than the 2006 total of $10.58 billion. The dramatic one-year increase may have reflected, in part, improved data collection and measurement techniques rather than actual increases in the remittances.3 Possibly, the estimates include other private flows. Probably also as a result, World Bank estimates are more modest but still show significant jumps in the size and share of remittances in overall flows. According to Wold Bank data, remittances tripled in the three years between 2005 and 2008, rising from US$3.3 billion to US$9.9 billion. Despite sharp increase in foreign direct investment between 2005 and 2006 from US$4.9 billion to US$8.8 billion, remittances over the fiveyear period between 2005 and 2009 still outpaced FDI on the average.
Destinations of Migrants Following the collapse of oil prices and the austerity measures adopted by successive Nigerian governments to correct the macroeconomic imbalances of the late 1970s and early 1980s, economic conditions deteriorated for a large proportion of the population. What followed was massive emigration of Nigerians, driven by the prospect of higher wages elsewhere (Bamoul and Blinder 1998; Kómoláfé 2002; Tomori and Adebiyi 2007). Most of the emigrants eventually settled outside the country permanently. As of 2006, an estimated 3.4 million Nigerians were living as migrants with different residence statuses across the world, up from