| ThisDay says that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is likely to revise higher its growth forecast for Nigeria, its Mission Chief to Nigeria, Jesmin Rahman, said yesterday.
Reuters quoted Rahman to have said the country’s surprise exit from recession in the fourth quarter would aid its economic outlook for the coming year.
Rahman did not put a figure on the 2021 growth overall, but said the medium-term growth rate could return to 2.5 percent.
The IMF had in January projected that the Nigerian economy would grow by 1.5 percent this year, slightly lower than the 1.7 percent it had predicted for the country in its previous forecast.
The multilateral institution had in its WEO titled: ‘Policy Support and Vaccines Expected to Lift Activity,’ however, predicted that in sub-Saharan Africa, growth will strengthen to 3.2 percent in 2021 and 3.9 percent in 2022.
The Punch reports that the Senate on Tuesday passed for second reading a bill seeking to empower the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria in assets recovery.
The proposed law also intends to strengthen the agency against economic sabotage by debtors with unpaid loans.
The AMCON Amendment Bill 2021, was sponsored by Senator Opeyemi Bamidele. Bamidele said the amendment would strengthen AMCON in stabilising Nigeria’s banking sector and empower the agency in carrying out its functions of assets and debt recovery.
Senator Uba Sani, representing Kaduna Central, said that AMCON largely depended on the resources from the resolution fund.
He said, “Failure to extend this amendment bill will certainly affect the operation of AMCON and it may force the government to bear the entire cost of debt management of AMCON.” Senator Adamu Aliero, representing Kebbi Central, said the amendment would give teeth to AMCON to recover all debts that were given to private individuals and companies.
The Sun says that the Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mallam Mele Kyari, has said that Nigeria lacks the resources to build a greenfield refinery currently at a estimated cost of $12billion.
He made the clarification while reacting to insinuations by critics that the $1.5 billion approved for the rehabilitation of the Port Harcourt Refinery would be enough to build a brand new refinery, noting that a new refinery would cost Nigeria between $7 billion and $12 billion which be hard to find at the moment.
This was even as Kyari defended the $1.5 billion Port Harcourt refinery rehabilitation amid widespread condemnation, saying it was a worthy undertaking.
On the propriety of spending so much to repair an old and disfunctional refinery that could easily have been sold off, the GMD explained that the refinery is a strategic national asset which should not be sold off just like that.
On the financing for the project, the NNPC helmsman said that African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), as a reliable lender, has agreed to raise $1billion towards the rehabilitation project.
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