Lai: We pumped money into the system to help Nigeria exit recession

Lai Mohammed, minister of information and culture, says government’s foresight and planning were factors responsible for the country’s exit from recession in a short time.

The minister said this on Saturday, while appearing on Sunrise Daily, a Channels TV programme, monitored by TheCable.

Nigeria exited recession with a 0.11 per cent growth in the fourth quarter of 2020.

Mohammed said government’s decision to prevent job losses, create new ones, and avoid the collapse of MSMEs in line with the economic sustainability plan, had positive impacts on the economy and made it rebound even while the COVID-19 subsists.

“We did not exit recession by accident,” the minister said.

“It was because of the hard work, foresight and planning of this government. Don’t forget that by March , the president set up the economic sustainability committee to see the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 and they came up with Nigeria’s economic sustainability plan to ensure we do not feel the economic impact of COVID-19.

“What we did to get out of recession was that we pumped money into the system. How did we do so? We did so by creating jobs. We did so by three major programmes: the first is the 1000 jobs of public works that was given to each of the local government area (LGAs) and we have 774 LGAs . So, when you have 774,000 young men working on public works, roads, and the economy, it goes a lot to boost the economy of the state.

“There is also the survival fund which the federal ministry of industry and investment supervised. One thing we agreed on was that we must prevent loss of jobs, we must create new ones and we must make sure MSMEs do not collapse. We also gave out a one-off grant where we gave out 30,000 to artisans, hairdressers.

“Recession or pandemic affects every part of the world . It is not unique to Nigeria alone.”

Mohammed also attributed the many bailouts of the federal government to states as another factor that stabilised the economy noting that were it not for the intervention, “many states would have been completely unviable.”

“This administration in particular has done so much to stabilize the states economically, politically and socially,” he said.

“This administration gave out N10 billion to every state to start infrastructure, gave support to each state, N1 billion a month for eight months and another N800 million a month for another eight months.”