Lai Mohammed Urges Nigerians to blame OPEC For Recession

Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, yesterday, cast blames on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as the major player responsible for the slowdown of the economy.

According to the minister, “Nigeria recorded positive economic developments in 2020, but these seem to have been overshadowed by the country’s recession. As you are all aware, Nigeria officially entered recession at the end of the third quarter (Q3), after the country’s GDP declined for the second consecutive quarter in 2020 (Q2 and Q3). That is in line with the traditional definition of a recession. The main reason for this recession is COVID-19 pandemic.

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The minister added that complementary fiscal, real sector, and monetary interventions have been proactively introduced by the government to forestall a worse decline and ameliorate the negative impacts of the covid-19 pandemic.

He reassured Nigerians that the current recession would be short-lived and that the country would return to positive growth soon, unlike the 2016 recession, which lasted for five quarters.

However, Eko Hot Blog gathered that the effect of the covid-19 pandemic is not only in the Nigerian economy, as different countries of the world, including economic giants like the US, the UK, and Canada, have entered a recession, due to the ravaging pandemic. Others include Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Russia, and Spain.

The minister assured Nigerians that the current recession would be short-lived and that the country would return to positive growth soon, unlike the 2016 recession, which lasted for five quarters.