Nigeria is technically in recession- Adeosun

At an appearance before the Senate on Thursday, Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, painted a gloomy picture of the economy, stating the country was already in recession.
The Minister appeared before the Senate to  brief the Lawmakers about the state of the economy and issues relating to the implementation of 2016 budget, as well as the Monetary/ Fiscal Policies adopted to salvage the present economic situation.
In her words: "Technically, in economic terms, if you have two periods of negative growth, you are technically in a recession. But I don't think we should spend too much time on that, we are in a tough place.
"Whether you call it recession or not, we are in a tough place, but the most important thing is that we are going to get out of it. Technically, we are in a recession, but I don't think we should dwell on definitions, I think we should really dwell on where we are going.
"Everything we are doing is moving outside of it, our social intervention programmes have been funded, those of providing reliefs to the very poorest, right down to every single local government would be touched by that programme.
"We have started and we will continue with it. We are not the only country in recession, many countries are doing far worse than us. But for Nigeria, what Nigerians want to know is how is that going to affect me and I want to assure everybody that what we are doing is going to work and it is going to turn this economy around."
The Finance Minister, who expressed optimism that Nigeria would get out of the recession, since it was not the only country experiencing this at the moment, said:  " I think if we are in recession, what I will like to say is we are going to come out of it and it would be a very short one.
"This is because the policies that we have would ensure that we don't go below where we need to go and I think with what we are doing, we would begin to turn the corner I believe by third quarter.
"I can confirm that there is no more subsidy, it is a market-driven price and, indeed, one of the good things that we are now seeing is that prices have actually come down.  There is now competition among filling stations for market share, which is a good thing.  It means that overtime, the market would continue to correct itself."
The Minister equally told the senators that so far, the government had released capital votes of N247.9 billion, with plans to release an additional N60 billion very soon, even as she disclosed that the Federal Government had released N74 billion to Ministry of Works in the last two months, compared to N19 billion the ministry received for the whole of 2015.
She stated that President Buhari had inherited negative reserves, and a salaries bill of N165bn.

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