Nigeria’s GDP grows by 0.51% In Q1, 2021

 In spite of the slower pace of economic activities in the first quarter of the year (Q1, 2021), GDP grew by 0.51 per­cent year-on-year, the Nation­al Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has said.

The NBS said this in the Nigerian Gross Domestic Product (GDP) report for Q1 2021, released on its website on Sunday in Abuja.

The bureau said this marked two consecutive quar­ters of growth, following neg­ative growth rates recorded in the second and third quarters of 2020.

It said the Q1 2021 growth rate was slower than the 1.87 percent growth rate recorded in Q1 2020 but higher than 0.11 percent recorded in Q4 2020, indicative of a slow but con­tinuous recovery.

“Nevertheless, quar­ter-on-quarter, real GDP grew at -13.93 percent in Q1 2021 compared to Q4 2020, reflect­ing a generally slower pace of economic activities at the start of the year.”

The NBS said that in the quarter under review, aggre­gate GDP stood at N40.01 tril­lion in nominal terms.

It added that this perfor­mance was higher when com­pared to the first quarter of 2020 which recorded aggregate GDP of N35.64 trillion, indicat­ing a year-on-year nominal growth rate of 12.25 percent.

Also, the nominal GDP growth rate in Q1 2021 was higher, relative to 12.01 per­cent growth recorded in the first quarter of 2020 as well as the 10.07 percent growth recorded in the preceding quarter.

The NBS classified the Ni­gerian economy into oil and non-oil sectors.

For the oil sector, in Q1, average daily oil production stood at 1.72 million barrels per day (mbpd).

This was lower than the average daily production of 2.07mbpd recorded in the same quarter of 2020 by 0.35mbpd but higher than the production volume of 1.56mbpd recorded in Q4 2020.

It added that the real growth of the oil sector was –2.21 percent (year-on-year) in Q1, indicating a decrease of –7.27 percent relative to the growth rate recorded in the corresponding quarter of 2020.

“Compared to Q4 2020 which recorded –19.76 percent growth rate, growth in Q1 was higher by 17.55 percent.

“Quarter-on-quarter, the oil sector recorded a growth rate of 35.65 percent in Q1.

“In terms of contribution to aggregate GDP, the oil sec­tor accounted for 9.25 percent of aggregate real GDP in Q1, slightly lower than 9.5 percent recorded in the corresponding period of 2020 but higher than in the preceding quarter, where it contributed 5.87 percent.”

The NBS said the non-oil sector grew by 0.79 percent in real terms in Q1, which was –0.75 percent lower com­pared to the rate recorded in the same quarter of 2020 and -0.89 percent lower than rates recorded in Q4 2020.

However, growth in the non-oil sector was driven mainly by the Information and Communication (Tele­communication) sector.