BREAKING: Nigeria's economy shrinks as recession bites

- The Nigerian economy has remained in its worst recession in 29 years

- The NBS report says that the GDP for first quarter of 2017 contracted by 0.52 percent

The National Bureau Statistics (NBS) said that the Nigerian economy has contracted despite that the country is moving out of the economy recession.

NAIJ.com gathered that the NBS confirmed this on Tuesday, May 23, as it released the gross domestic product (GDP) report for the first quarter of 2017, which showed that the economy contracted by 0.52 percent year-on-year.

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It was learnt that in August 2016, NBS called Nigeria’s first recession since the return of democracy in 1999, stating that the economy shrank by 2.06 percent in the second quarter of 2016 to hit its lowest point in nearly three decades.

According to World Bank data, the last time Nigeria had this magnitude of economic decline was under the military regime of Ibrahim Babangida, when the economy recorded consecutive decline of 0.51 percent and 0.82 percent in first and second quarters of 1987.

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