Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media & Publicity, Garba Shehu The Presidency on Monday stated that the 43 farmers that were killed by Boko Haram on Saturday did not have military clearance to be on the rice farms when the attack happened. The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said this in an interview with the BBC on Monday. He said while not blaming the victims for the incident, the truth must be said. Shehu said, “The government is sad that this tragic incident has happened. 43 or thereabout of innocent farm workers, most of them had their throats slit by a heartless band of terrorists. People need to know what it is like in the Lake Chad Basin area. “Much of those areas have been liberated from Boko Haram terrorists but there are a number of spaces that have not been cleared for the return of villagers who have been displaced. So, ideally, all of these places ought to pass the test of military clearances before farmers

Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, has entered its second recession in five years as official figures published on Saturday show that the economy shrank again in the third quarter of this year. This year’s recession, ocassioned by the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, is worse than that of 2016. The National Bureau of Statistics, in its Gross Domestic Product report for Q3, said the GDP, the broadest measure of economic prosperity, fell by 3.62 in the three months to September. Economists consider two consecutive quarters of shrinking GDP as the technical definition of a recession. For the first time in more than three years, the Nigerian economy shrank in the second quarter of this year as the GDP fell by 6.10 per cent, compared with a growth of 1.87 per cent in Q1. The NBS had said in August that the economic decline in Q2 was largely attributable to significantly lower levels of both domestic and international economic activity resulting from nationwide shutdown effort