(3 minutes read)
· Nigeria’s economy grew 1.87% in the first three months of the
2020 fiscal as against the same period a year ago, according to
official figures released.
· Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics forecasts that the
economy in the worst case scenario to contract this fiscal by 8.9%.
Nigeria’s economy grew 1.87% in the first three months of the 2020
fiscal as against the same period a year ago, according to official
figures released. The growth figure decelerated from the previous
quarter riding on the back of weak oil prices compounded by the
pandemic. The growth is the slowest for the last six quarters.
Nigeria has yet to recover from the 2016 recession that rendered
over 13 million people unemployed. Nigeria’s National Bureau of
Statistics forecasts that the economy in the worst case scenario to
contract this fiscal by 8.9%. However, to tide over the fall in
prices and to recover more revenue, the West African country has upped
its crude production to 2.07 million barrels a day. This is the
highest level for the last four years or so. That pick up in
production coincided with a global slide in the price of oil, negating
the likely increase in the oil revenue. The oil sector contracted to
1.3% from the previous quarter to 5.06%.
The performance of the non-oil sector was also lackluster. It grew
just by 1.55%, down 0.72% from the last three months of 2019.
According to World Bank experts, Africa’s largest oil producer will
have a more pronounced recession than it had in 2016, due to the
combined effect of pandemic and low oil prices due to lockdown in most
of the countries in the world.
