Nigeria’s current recession, which was officially announced on Saturday, will be short-lived, Zainab Ahmed, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, has said.
Nigeria slid into its second recession in five years after the gross domestic product fell by 3.62 percent in the third quarter of the year, the National Bureau of Statistics, announced on Saturday, November 21, 2020. It had contracted by 6.10 percent in the second quarter of the year.
But Ahmed said on Monday that the country would emerge from the recession in the fourth quarter of this year or by the first quarter of 2021.
She spoke at the ongoing 26th Nigerian Economic Summit organised by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group and the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget, and National Planning.
She said the COVID-19-induced recession followed the pattern across the world where many countries had entered an economic recession.
“Let me remind us that before the impact of COVID-19, the Nigerian economy was experiencing sustained growth, which had been improving quarter by quarter until the second quarter of 2020, when the impact of the COVID-19 was felt,” Ahmed said.
She cited other countries that had declined more steeply than Nigeria, including the United Kingdom and the United States.
“Nigeria is not alone in this, but I will say that Nigeria has outperformed all of these economies in terms of the record of a negative growth.”
She also cited South Africa, which recorded a decline of -50 per cent compared to Nigeria’s -6.1 per cent in Q2, and is expected to record a deeper negative growth in Q3.
“While the economy has entered into recession in the third quarter, the trend of the growth suggests that this will be a short-lived recession, and indeed by the fourth or, at worst, the first quarter of 2021, the country will exit recession.
“Our expectation of a quick exit, which will be historically fast, is anchored on the several complementary fiscal, real sector and monetary interventions that have been proactively introduced by the government to forestall a far worse decline of the economy and alleviate the negative consequences of the pandemic.”
