Speaking to state house correspondents at the end of the National
Economic Council, NEC, yesterday July 21st, the Minister of Budget and
National Planning, Udoma Udo Udoma, said that the economy is presently
in a bad shape but would start to pick up as from the third quarter. He
confirmed Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun’s comment at the senate
briefing yesterday that Nigeria is technically in recession.
“Recession is basically when you have two quarters of negative growth.
We had a first quarter of negative growth and we are still waiting to
get all the figures for the second quarter, which has just ended in
June. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) will be giving us all the
figures but if as we suspect the second quarter is also negative, then
of course technically you could say that we are in recession if those
figures turned out to be so. But even if we are not, the situation in
the economy right now is one that, of course, we are addressing. Some of
it was expected, some of it was not. We did expect the low oil price
but we did not expect the level of disruption that we got in the Niger
Delta, such that oil production went down and we are not likely to
achieve the 2.2 million barrels per day because it went down to 1.2
million barrels per day, a little over about 1.3 million barrels per
day. So you can imagine the impact of that. Measures are being taken to
address those issues. We expect that by the third quarter we will start
to pick up and we expect to finish the year in positive territory. That
is what we are expecting. We expect to be marginally positive by the end
of this year. But by next year we will now start to pick up and we will
have much more growth next year,” he said.