By Dipo Olowookere
The price of the Brent crude oil traded at $80 per barrel on Tuesday afternoon after dropping from that level last week.
Before it traded at $80 this afternoon (at about 2.08pm), when Business Post checked, the commodity was traded at $79.71 per barrel as at 1:45pm today.
The price of the Brent crude oil has already gained 0.98 percent or $0.78 on Tuesday and 48.86 percent this year.
This is definitely a good news to Nigeria, which had its parliament put the oil benchmark at $50.5 per barrel in the 2018 budget passed last Wednesday.
Nigeria went into recession in the second quarter of 2016 as a result of drop in the price of crude oil at the global market.
Apart from the fall in the price of the commodity, the country also had to deal with the issue of drop in its output as a result of attacks on oil facilities in the oil rich Niger Delta region by angry youths known as militants.
The Nigerian authorities had to meet with leaders of the region to broker peace.
This worked as the volume of crude oil produced from the region increased after the consultations.
In the 2018 budget passed last week by the National Assembly, Nigeria is expected to produced about 2.2 million barrels of crude oil per day.
Modupe Gbadeyanka