• Senators seek measures to fix economy
The Senate yesterday resolved to invite the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, to brief it on the state of the economy.
The invitation followed the adoption of a motion on “urgent need to address present economic state of the nation”.
Senator Bassey Albert Akpan (Akwa Ibom North East), who sponsored the motion, said the motion was informed by last week’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) release on the nation’s economic scorecard for the first quarter of this year for Gross Domestic Product (GDP), inflation and unemployment.
He observed that the report showed that the economy plunged into recession with a decline of 0.3 per cent year-on-year in real term, which is a drastic drop from 2.11 per cent in quarter four of last year’s GDP.
He also observed that from the report, unemployment rate rose to 21.1 per cent from 10.4 per cent in the last quarter of last year.
According to him, unemployment also increased to 19.1 per cent from 18.7 per cent in the same period while inflation rate rose from 9.6 per cent in January this year to 13.8 per cent in April this year with attendant increase in prices of basic food commodities and services in the country.
Akpan said he was worried that the declining GDP and unemployment, besides the high inflation rate, clearly showed that economic policies “are not achieving desired impact and requires an urgent review to avoid further plunge in our economy”.
The lawmaker is worried that the current economic contraction is the first major drastic slump since June, 2004, which, according to the CBN, is a 12-year-low when the World Bank’s position is a 21-year-low.
He recalled that the CBN, had in March deployed a contracting monetary policy increasing bench mark interest rate from 11per cent and cash reserve ratio from 20per cent to 22.5 per cent.
“The question is why contracting monetary policy instead of expansionary monetary policy of boosting economic activities at such a critical time as this,” he said.
Akpan said he was deeply concerned that the continued complacency of the current state of the economy, if allowed unchecked, will set the tone for a full blown economic recession by the end of June as already confirmed by the CBN in its last Monetary Policy Committee meeting.
