The economy will pick up in the third quarter- Mins of Budget and National Planning says
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment