The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently projected that Nigeria’s economy would soon witness its worst recession in 30 years.

This projection was part of the Fund’s April 2020 World Economic Outlook report released penultimate Tuesday in Washington DC, United States at the commencement of its 2020 Spring meeting held through video conferencing.

The IMF further said that Nigeria’s economy will recede by 3.4 per cent in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted the global supply chain of most commodities, including the country’s main export commodity, crude oil.

It noted that this would be the worst economic setback in 30 years for Africa’s largest economy, after a negative economic growth of 1.51 per cent in 2016.

According to the IMF Chief Economist and Research Director, Gita Gopinath, the impending global recession would be the worst since the Great Depression between 1929 and 1932 when the advanced economies shrank by 16 per cent.

While Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to shrink by 3.4 per cent and land her in another recession, the Fund’s projected outlook for Africa’s most advanced economy (South Africa) is even worse at 5.8 per cent, from a 2019 growth of 0.2 per cent.

Nigeria was hoping to improve on her 2.2 per cent 2019 growth rate before the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic which saw the global oil price of petroleum tumbling. In fact, while oil prices were taking a bashing (no thanks to the muscle flexing between Russia and Saudi Arabia), the COVID-19 pandemic simply aggravated the situation. Currently, North Sea Brent crude is reported to be trading at USD 31.48 per barrel while Western Texas Intermediate sells for around USD17.75 per barrel. OPEC Basket is USD12.22.

To say that Nigerians did not see this coming will be the height of insincerity as there had been suggestions to nearly every administration to diversify the nation’s economy as to move the country away from its over dependence on petroleum as main revenue earner.

The Tide is deeply troubled that this gloomy projection is coming at a time when the average Nigerian is wishing that the trauma of the 2016 recession would soon be over and for things to return to normal.

The effects of job losses, high cost of living, border closure, herder–farmer clashes and the rising crime rate had led to a worsening of the nation’s misery.

We are also not unaware of the latest warning by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in which Nigeria was listed as one of the 10 countries that would soon experience severe famine of biblical proportion.

With these projections indicating impending national calamities, we fear that the government and, indeed, Nigerians hardly have the time to make any meaningful preparations.

Already, the USD 57 per barrel crude oil benchmark in the 2020 budget has been reviewed downward, even as today’s oil price still makes nonsense of that review. Also, capital expenditure has been severely downsized. This is even as the nation’s USD 1.5 billion debt servicing pledges have become impracticable and need to be renegotiated.

Inflation rate has already entered double-digit while the steady depletion of the external reserve piles pressure on the naira’s worth. What’s more, with COVID-19 came the adoption of national and interstate border closures as part of containment measures. The intra-city lockdowns that also followed led to a halt in economic activities with the attendant negative effects on Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The nation may therefore begin to reconsider redenominating her currency as was successfully done by Ghana some years ago, after decades of economic doldrums. Debt forgiveness is already out of any consideration for Nigeria because she is no longer in the world’s list of Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs), especially since after rebasing her economy in 2013 and emerging as the largest economy in Africa. She is now considered a middle income nation.

Efforts should be geared to better manage the nation’s available income. This period should be likened to a war situation when emphasis should be reduced in infrastructural development, rather efforts should focus on amassing weapons to attack the common enemy which in this case comprises Coronavirus, corruption, misery, hunger, climate change, among others.

There is no doubt that COVID-19 lockdowns have eroded whatever savings that were available for investment to the Micro, Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (MSMEs) in the country. In fact, some have had to convert their present stocks of goods for their daily consumption and survival. And this renders a serious blow to the nation’s GDP.

We commend the IMF for, as usual, alerting most vulnerable countries like Nigeria on the difficult times ahead. We also believe that, as it had always done in the past, the Fund will follow this up with a list of some necessary steps that need be taken by the government in order to curtail the extent of these difficulties.

And to the government, the call for a resort to mechanized agriculture and massive food storage has never been more expedient for a country of about 200 million people than now.