LAGOS, (The Southern African Times) – Nigerian finance minister Zainab Ahmed has said the country is expected to exit an economic recession mainly blamed on the COVID-19 pandemic and achieve stronger growth from 2021 up to 2024.
Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP), projected to grow 2.5 percent in 2021, up from a shrink of 1.92 percent in 2020, will rise 4.2 percent in 2022, the minister told a forum on the country’s medium term fiscal strategy paper in Abuja on Thursday.
“We estimate a 4.2 percent uptake in 2022, a decrease to 2.3 percent in 2023, and a jump to 3.3 percent in 2024,” Ahmed said.
Inflation is predicted to fall marginally to 13 percent in 2022, down from 15 percent in 2021, according to the minister.
“We foresee a little drop to 13 percent in 2022, then 11 percent in 2023, and 10 percent in 2024,” she said.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) the Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria’s GDP rose 0.51 percent in real terms in the first quarter of 2021, marking two consecutive quarters of growth following negative growth rates recorded in the second and third quarters of 2020.
The growth rate in the first quarter of 2021 was slower than the 1.87 percent recorded in the same period of 2020 but higher than 0.11 percent recorded in the fourth quarter of 2020, indicative of a slow but continuous recovery, according to an NBS report.
