At the ongoing Spring Meetings of the IMF/World Bank,last Friday,Nigerian Finance Minister ,Kemi Adeosun said the reason why the Federal Government has not taken the option of applying for loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to tackle the economic situation of the country is due to the declining price of crude oil.
The Minister, who spoke at a panel discussion on Africa titled: “Sub-Saharan Africa: Just a Rough Patch,” said Nigeria is adapting to its new realities and it is implementing fiscal policies to steer the country back on track for stable growth with a diversified economy.The policies and investment, according to her, should enable Nigeria to show positive growth in 2017.
She further emphasised that what the country is passing through is surmountable , adding that government is already applying a cocktail of measures to address the problem.
“Nigeria is not sick and even if we are, we have our own local remedy,” the Minister said, in an apparent response to a question on why the government has refused to apply for IMF loans. Noting that the real vulnerability in the Nigerian economy is over-dependence on a single source of revenue, oil, she said, “We have resolved to build resilience into the country’s economy to hedge against future oil shocks. This is because dependence on oil brings about vulnerability and laziness. So we are doing a combination of things to diversify our economy, with revenue mobilisation to enable sufficient investment in developing the non-oil sectors.”
Other speakers at the event are IMF Deputy Managing Director Mitsuhiro Furusawa and Rwanda Finance Minister Claver Gatete. 
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