President Muhammadu Buhari has blamed the country’s current slide into worst economic recession since 1987 on COVID-19 pandemic.
The President said this while declaring open the 26th Nigerian Economic Summit themed “Building Partnerships for Resilence”.
President Buhari who was represented by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, said that the decline in the nation’s Gross Domestic Product came after 12 succesive quarters of positive growth.
He added that COVID-19 lockdown, rising unemployment, business failures and disruption in global supply chains caused the current recession.
The President said;
“We can all recall that during the lockdown, farming did not take place, businesses were closed; schools were closed as were hotels and restaurants.
“Also, airlines stopped flying, while inter-state commerce was disrupted.
“The economy only began to recover when these activities resumed and if we are able to sustain the nearly three percentage point increase from the second quarter decline of minus 6.1 per cent, the performance in the fourth quarter could take us into positive territory."
While also disclosing his administration’s effort to mitigate such impact by the introduction of the Economic Sustainability Plan (ESP), he revealed that all the ESP programmes are reliant on the private sector which plays a major key role in creating and conserving jobs and the production and delivery of services in digital technologies, solar, power, housing and agriculture.
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