FG Has Been Borrowing Sensibly – Finance Minister Zainab Ahmed

Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, has said that the President Buhari-led Federal Government has borrowing sensibly to take care of the infrastructural deficit in the country, noting that if there’s no investment that will return revenue in the future, there will be regrets.

This is coming a few days after the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan said the Federal, State, and Local governments must act swiftly to find lasting solutions to the menace of agencies that were not remitting their internally generated revenues to the TSA and look for ways to reduce the country’s borrowing generally.Addressing the recent report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on the growth of the economy during a press conference, Zainab Ahmed said that the country’s economy would have grown above 5 percent in the second quarter of 2021 if not for the security challenges that led to a slow growth in the agricultural sector.
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“The 2021 second quarter growth reflects better economic performance compared to the same quarter last year. The same quarter last year, we had a negative growth of -6.10 percent. It is also better than the first quarter of 2021. The service sector recorded a strong performance, growing by 9.27 percent this reporting quarter, representing the fastest growth in this sector since 2010.”“The second quarter growth of 2021 would have been much stronger than the 5.01 percent but for agriculture that recorded a slightly lower growth. A number of bottlenecks within the system including insecurity which has negatively affected the sector negatively. Also, the industrial sector slowed down to -1.3 percent”, she added.
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Mrs Zainab Ahmed also said that the non-oil sector contributed majorly to the growth witnessed in the second quarter. “The non-oil sector recorded a growth of 7 percent which represents the fastest growth since the third quarter of 2014”, she said. TRENDING VIDEO OF THE DAY: KOKO Street: I Wanted JMK To Stay – BBNaija Fan

Photos Credit: Getty