The federal government has admitted that the economy is in recession.
Minister of Budget and National Planning, Udoma Udo Udoma, yesterday, said the two previous quarters showed negative indices, a sign of technical recession.
He, however, expressed hope that the economy would pick up in the third quarter.
Speaking yesterday at the State House, he noted that “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.
“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”.
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