The Nigerian economy under president Muhammadu Buhari has slumped into its second recession in five years after the gross domestic product...
The Nigerian economy under president Muhammadu Buhari has
slumped into its second recession in five years after the gross domestic
product contracted the second consecutive quarter.
The National Bureau of Statistics on Saturday announced that
the nation recorded a contraction of 3.62 per cent in the third quarter of
2020.
This year’s recession, occasioned by the economic fallout of
the COVID-19 pandemic, is worse than that of 2016. The country had earlier
recorded a 6.10 per cent contraction in the second quarter.
It is the nation’s second recession since 2016, and the
worst economic decline in almost four decades.
For the first time in more than three years, the Nigerian
economy shrank in the second quarter of this year as the GDP fell by 6.10 per
cent, compared with a growth of 1.87 per cent in Q1.
The NBS had said in August that the economic decline in Q2
was largely attributable to significantly lower levels of both domestic and
international economic activity resulting from nationwide shutdown efforts
aimed at containing the COVID-19 pandemic.
It said the contraction in Q2 brought to an end the
three-year trend of low but positive real growth rates recorded since the
2016/17 recession.
The economy, which emerged from its first recession in 25
years in Q2 2017 when it posted a 0.7 per cent growth, had continued its slow
recovery since then but the COVID-19 crisis made things worse.
In 2016, the economy slipped into recession in Q2 as the GDP
shrank by 2.1 per cent after falling by 0.4 per cent in Q1 on the back of the
steep fall in global crude oil prices and the country’s production volumes.
Last month, the World Bank revised its 2020 forecast for
Nigeria’s economy to -4.1 per cent from its previous projection of -3.2 per
cent, saying the country’s near-term outlook was subject to “considerable
uncertainty”.
The bank had said in June that the collapse in crude oil
prices, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, was expected to “plunge the
Nigerian economy into a severe recession, the worst since the 1980s”.
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