The Buhari Media Organisation (BMO) has commended the 2019 real growth of 2.27 per cent in the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as reported by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
The 2.27 per cent growth is against the 2.1 per cent prediction of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the same year.
In a statement signed by its Chairman Niyi Akinsiju in Abuja on Tuesday, BMO noted that the growth was the highest recorded so far since 2016 recession.
He added that it represented an increase of 360 basis points over the growth rate.
Akinsiju said that the overall GDP figure was in line with the implementation of President Muhammadu Buhari’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP).
According to him, efforts by the Federal Government on economic policies have been largely successful over the past few years. This has shown that a lot has been happening on the economic front.
“If we did 2.27 per cent growth in 2019, it shows economic momentum.
“What is impressive about this is that we are driving our economic growth principally by domestic generated policies pivoted on the domestication of our economy.
“This might have been criticised, but this new report from NBS shows that it is working,” Akinsiju said.
According to him, challenges in an economy can in truth only respond to homegrown solutions and what the government has given the country since 2015 effectively are homegrown solutions.
He said: “These are reflecting in increasing figures of contributions from our critical Information and Communication (Telecommunications), Agriculture (Crop Production), Financial and Insurance Services (Financial Institutions), and Manufacturing.
“Our manufacturing GDP is moving up as a reflection of growth in our purchasing power index which has increased consecutively for 32 months. We cannot have such increase and not have a consequent increase in GDP.
“If other administrations had diligently utilised resources earned from oil and gas over the years we would have had a broader well-diversified economy, but what they did was fritter away all opportunities and earnings in the oil and gas sector.
“Now we are seeing an obvious properly deployed and employed resources earned from the oil and gas sector, properly channeled into other productive sectors of the economy.
“To the extent of that channeling, we are now seeing the results of domesticating and diversifying the economy.”
According to BMO chairman, impressive figures from NBS show that the economic policies of the Federal Government are working.
He added that the policies developed by the government had continued to protect the poor and at the same time grow the Nigerian economy.
“The fourth quarter, 2019 figure of 2.55 per cent compared to second quarter 2015 figure of 2.35 per cent before President Buhari came into power tells us that we are growing in a way that we will soon grow beyond our GDP-population growth ratio which is said to be at 2.6 per cent.
“Nigeria has shown progress and considering the current policy deployments by the Federal Government, our GDP growth rate would increase and improve our GDP-population growth ratio.
“As we beat IMF projection for 2019, we are sure to beat their 2 per cent 2020 projection by an even wider margin.
“Nigeria has seen a progressive increase in GDP since we exited recession; our economy has shown a capacity for growth from 0.8 per cent in 2017 to 1.9 per cent in 2018 and 2.27 per cent in 2019.
“This shows we are strongly moving. We are sure that in the year 2020, with all the policies being set out by Federal Government, our GDP growth will be at 2.9 per cent to 3 per cent as projected by the government”, he said.
