Nigeria is headed for a 'full-blown economic crisis' - Analysts

Nigeria is headed for a 'full-blown economic crisis' - Analysts

Nigeria's economic crisis is getting worse, Analysts have concluded.

On Friday the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics revealed that the country's economy shrank by 0.4% year-over-year in the first quarter — way worse than expected.

According to uk.businessinsider, Economists were expecting the country to grow by 1.8% year-over-year, according to the Bloomberg consensus.

And now analysts aren't feeling too good about the situation going forward.

"We have long warned of a slow-burning crisis in Nigeria," Capital Economics' Africa economist John Ashbourne said. "It now seems that this view was too optimistic: the country is headed into a full-blown economic crisis."

Nigeria continues to suffer from numerous economic headaches, including lower oil prices and the government's controversial foreign-exchange and price-control policies (which analysts have more or less deemed a failure).

The biggest drop in growth was in Nigeria's manufacturing sector, which Ashbourne wrote was crushed by the country's FX policies.

"This is very bad news for Nigeria's government, which has justified the current FX system as a method of promoting non-oil industries," Ashbourne said. "It is now clear that these policies have — as we'd long argued — made a bad situation worse."

Still, the scariest thing about this latest gross-domestic-product number is that it doesn't factor in any of the debilitating problems Nigeria has seen in the second quarter, including but not limited to the fuel-shortage crisis and some of the oil-production disruptions by the Niger Delta Avengers.

In short, Ashbourne concluded grimly, "the worst is yet to come."

US based Adétílewá Adétòmíwà told Elombah.com: Federal government of Nigeria is committing economic crime against the people of Nigeria by fixing forex rate and not making it available at the fixed price.

The government is raping the wealth of average Nigerians by selling millions of dollars per week at subsidized rate to his business friends while making poor people buy at parallel market.

One particular northern industrialist buys an average of 15 million dollars every week at the official rate.

"That is 15,000,000 X 160 as the amount of our common wealth President Buhari is giving to the notherner every week, nobody will get such free money and be poor", Mr Adétòmíwà stated.

"I have nothing against the man as a person, but I'm against Buhari policy of feeding him with our commonwealth, that is a fraud and serious scam against average Nigerians", he added.

-Elombah