Our Reporter
Nigeria’s exit from the last recession was not accidental but a result of “hardwork, foresight and deliberate planning by government,” Information and Culture Minister Lai Mohammed said yesterday.
Reviewing the national economy during Channels Television’s programme, Sunrise Daily, yesterday, Mohammed recalled how President Muhammadu Buhari set up the Economic Sustainability Committee last year to work out ways of mitigating the effects of COVID-19.
The Committee came up with Economic Sustainability Plans which, according to him, government put into use.
He said: “When you talk of GDP, it is the total sum of the value of your services and goods. Clearly, if there is a lockdown, you cannot go to work, and there is bound to be a recession.
“What we did was that we pumped money into the system by creating jobs.
“The first is the1,000 jobs through public works given to each local government and we have 774 local government councils.
“So, we have 774,000 workforce engaged on public works like road, and this goes a long way in boosting the economy.”
Mohammed said government equally introduced the Survival Fund which the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment supervised to prevent loss of jobs and create new ones.
The Survival Fund, according to the minister, was to ensure that Small and Medium Scale Enterprises did not collapse.
“With Survival Fund, we asked for companies that employ between five and 50 people and we gave them payroll support for about three months.
“About 500,000 MSMEs benefitted from this programme,” he said.
The minister said the government also gave One-Off-Grant whereby N10,000 was given to each of 233,000 artisans, including hairdressers and mechanics.
He said some other programmes introduced by government included Conditional Cash Transfer with 3.6 million beneficiaries, as well as N-POWER, TRADERMONI, FARMERMONI, MARKETMONI which reaches millions of people.
Besides the survival plans and economic sustainability plans, he said the government is investing heavily in infrastructure and employing more people.
The minister said that the government is doing more with less resources, adding that the effects of the pandemic was not peculiar to the country but a global affair.
Nigeria slipped into recession for the second time in four years in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic after the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined for the second consecutive quarter in 2020 (Q2 and Q3)
The economy, however, came out of the recession in the fourth quarter as growth in agriculture and telecommunications had offset a sharp drop in oil production.
The GDP grew by 0.11 per cent in the three months through December from a year earlier, compared with a decline of 3.6 per cent in the third quarter as announced by the National Bureau of Statistics.
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