BREAKING: Nigeria, Africa’s Largest Economy, Is Finally Out Of Recession

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), who declared Nigeria’s worst recession in 29 years, said on Tuesday, that the west African country grew by 0.55 percent in GDP terms for Q2 2017.

According to the Nigerian Gross Domestic Product report earlier released by NBS on Monday, the economy recorded a positive growth after five consecutive quarters of contractions since Q1 2016.

The 0.55% growth recorded is 2.04% higher than the rate recorded in the corresponding quarter of 2016 where a contraction of -1.49% was recorded.

Quarter on quarter, real GDP growth was 3.23%.

The oil sector was estimated to have averaged at 1.84 million barrels per day, which is 0.15 million barrels higher than the daily average production recorded in the first quarter of June.

The non-oil sector, which was driven by Agriculture, finance & insurance, electricity, gas, steam and air-conditioning supply and other services grew by 0.45% in real terms.

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This is 0.83% higher than the rate recorded in second quarter 2016 and -0.28% lower than the rate recorded in first quarter of 2017.

The data showed that Nigeria’s economic recovery was driven principally by the performance of four main economic activities comprising oil, agriculture, manufacturing and trade.

The results revealed that Oil GDP recovered significantly from -11.63 per cent in Q2 2016 and -15.40 per cent in Q1 2017 to 1.64 per cent in Q2 2017.

While Oil GDP expanded considerably in the second quarter of 2017, Non-oil GDP only grew at 0.45 per cent, down from 0.72 per cent in the preceding quarter and -0.38 in the corresponding period in 2016.

Remarkably, agriculture continued its strong and positive growth, which it had maintained throughout the recession, growing by 3.01 per cent in Q2 2017, from 3.39 per cent in Q1 2017 and 4.53 per cent in Q2 2016.

Also, manufacturing retained its positive growth for the second consecutive quarter in Q2 2017, growing at 0.64 per cent compared to 1.36 per cent in Q1 2017 and -3.36 per cent in Q2 2016.

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Trade, which has a dominant share of GDP remained negative at -1.62 per cent, but the contraction in the sector decelerated from the -3.08 per cent recorded in Q1 2017 while electricity and gas recorded strong growth by 35.5 per cent, compared to -5.04 per cent in Q1 2017 and -10.46 per cent in Q2 2016.

Financial institutions grew by 11.78 per cent in Q2 2017, compared to 0.60 per cent in Q1 2017 and -13.24 per cent in Q2 2016 while the industry sector grew positively by 1.45 per cent in Q2 2017, after nine consecutive quarters of negative growth since Q4 2014.

Yemi Kale, Statistician General, had told Bloomberg in an interview that there was a likelihood that the economy exited recession in June 2017 but he was not sure because all the numbers had not been collated.

“Intuitively, we might be getting out of recession in the second quarter but I can’t say until all the numbers are in.”

“If it doesn’t happen in the second quarter, it will be a much reduced negative and it will definitely happen in the third quarter unless we have a new round of shocks in the later weeks.”

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