The future that we were warned
against seem to have arrived. Reality has set in and hardship is hitting harder
in many homes. Just the other day, I heard a story of a woman of four kids who
traded one of them in order to feed the rest. She allegedly went to the
market with the youngest child of may be 4 years old and after requesting for
food stuff, left the child with the seller in pretense to go bring the money
from her car. The seller through the help of the young lad was able to trace
the woman to the house where she was found having a meal with the rest of the
family. She obviously had made up her mind to sacrifice that child in order to
save the rest rather than lose all. For me, that story best defined hardship!
The National Bureau of Statistics today, released the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures for the
second quarter of 2016 and it showed a further negative growth from -0.36 in
the first quarter to -2-06 per cent. Recession as explained by many economists is
simply a situation where there is a general downturn in any economy which is
usually associated with declining Gross Domestic Product (GDP), high inflation
and high unemployment (these are the true and real description of the Nigeria
economy at the moment).
A major indicator of a recession
is when there are two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth as
measured by a country’s GDP. This is obviously the state of the nation by all
indications. I was analyzing this report with a friend this afternoon and he
asked a funny but vital question “Is
Nigeria just getting into recession?” according to him, recession was long
resident in Nigeria with a mansion in highbrow area of the country. We all
laughed hard when he said this but really there was something to think about in that
statement; is Nigeria just getting into
recession really?
Well, the fact is that there are two
sub indicators of recession which are: the leading indicator and lagging
indicator. While the latter includes unemployment rate, leading indicator
materializes before the recession is officially declared which is usually seen
through a steady contraction in the stock market. Nigeria have been in
recession long before now only that it has become more glaring and the effect
is spreading faster than expected. Going by both the leading and lagging
indicators, it is confirmed that Nigeria is in recession. We hear that an emergency
economic bill is being passed by the Federal Government in order to steer the
country out of recession and I wonder why we had to wait till it got to this
state before taking necessary steps. Well, whatever the case may be, we hope
and sincerely pray to get out of this real soon.
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