When, two weeks ago, for the first time in months, the price of crude oil rose to $40 per barrel, up from about $30 in the international oil market, many discerning Nigerians chose to celebrate only with a high dose of caution.
Understandably, most of the suffering in the land today is traceable to fallen oil price, but as my brother and respected Sun columnist Mr. Steve Nwosu puts it, there is the fear that a quick return to easy money would get us returning to our old prodigal ways of exporting millions of jobs by importing even those things we could produce in our bedrooms.
Whereas it is simplistic to express the shortage of the green bucks as somewhat representing a dooms day, there is the correct reasoning that it has somehow come to us, as a nation, a blessing in disguise because we have been forced to look inwards. Without necessarily planning for it, jobs are being created and more and more opportunities are opening up in our import-dependent economy. With prices of foreign-made goods jerking up almost by the day, many Nigerians now produce the ‘designer’ products we thought we could not live without.
When the price of the foreign-made soap I was using went beyond my reach owing to scarcity of the Dollar , my wife came up with a solution. She quickly learnt how to produce a local variant, and a day after buying some good quantity of shea butter from a village in Nasarawa State, she mixed the other ingredients needed and in no time, came up with a soap that even a NAFDAC official confirmed is by all definition, better than the foreign one we were spending so much money to buy. The woman has picked up so quickly that we are planning to engage a local packaging company to start exporting what we were importing, all thanks to scarcity of the Dollar.
Now, not even state governors engage in the kind of squandermania that was hitherto their defining feature. The in-thing is belt-tightening, and the smart ones among them, such as my big brother, Hon Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State, are busy teaching their people how to catch a fish, as the Chinese would say, working hard towards lifting thousands of their people out of poverty by helping them learn different skills and trades to become self-reliant.
It wasn’t just by accident or mere rhetoric that China is today the second biggest economy in the world. In that country for ages, virtually everyone is engaged in some economic activity, whereas, in contrast, we made name as the largest consumers of the most expensive wines ever produced. Some of the things we import with glee from China are being produced by housewives from their living rooms. Malaysia, too, got out of the economic recession that hit Asia in 1997 because Malaysians supported then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed in his Look-East policy that encouraged them to first, patronise goods made in the country and secondly, other Asian countries.
Sadly, in Nigeria, we politicise virtually everything. Some people have even gone to the ridiculous extent of insisting that the Central Bank Governor, Godwin Emefiele should be sacked just because he was appointed by former President Goodluck Jonathan. Shockingly, one of those spearheading this move is a professor of economics.
God so kind, even in the wilderness, there are voices of reason. Two days ago, Edo State Governor, Adams Oshiomhole, as well as a coalition of civil society groups, rose in defence of Emefiele, describing those making the call as blood suckers.
The governor insisted that those angling for the sack of Emefiele were merely invisible hands who have continued to thwart the nation’s economic resources for their selfish interest.
“If a governor is doing fine, his hiring and firing is not a matter that should be discussed by faceless Facebook manipulators, and by the time you unmask the people behind it, you will discover that they are palm wine drinkers,” he said.
Oshiomhole said with the challenge of running the economy undergoing a recession where there is limited inflow of foreign exchange, the government does not want to trigger a process that will lead to endless devaluation that will ultimately reduce the Nigerian naira to Zimbabwean dollar.
“President Buhari is not going to be fooled by people who want to have a regime where government is just an onlooker and allow the naira to become worthless and people are making money from speculation. So those guys are wasting their time,” he said.
The Edo State governor noted that the CBN governor, as also fully analysed by Thisday, was right in insisting on the 41 items that had been denied access to forex from the interbank forex market, adding that “people who have been feeding fat on our common patrimony, manipulating the exchange rate and moving money across boundaries are the speculators spreading the campaign for his sack.
“It is these speculators, because the CBN governor has been saying we cannot open the doors to all kinds of imports such as toothpicks, tomato paste and all sorts of things who have been feeding fat on our common patrimony, manipulating the exchange rate, moving money across borders, and taking advantage of electronic money transfers, that are behind these campaigns,” he said.
Oshiomhole added: “Of course there are some opportunistic elements, people who feel that if this man goes, I will get there and they are ready to go to any length to remove him.
“I think this government is making a point that the hiring and firing of CBN governors need not be a political decision, because we should respect institutions.
I think the CBN governor is right, he is standing his grounds and those who are opposed to him are free to speak, but I know that President Buhari is not going to be fooled by people who want to see a regime where government is just an onlooker and allows our naira to become worthless and for people to make money from speculation, so those guys are wasting their time.”
In a similar vein, a coalition of civil society groups rose in defence of Emefiele and condemned the threat of a protest by “a shadowy, bogus and unscrupulous group parading itself as a civil society organisation.”
The civil society groups stated that the central bank governor was being persecuted for the policies on the implementation of the Bank Verification Number (BVN), restriction on foreign exchange allocation, reform of the bureau de change sub-sector, and refusal by the central bank to devalue the naira.
While deeply appreciating the difficulties and anxieties of many Nigerians given the present tough economic environment, the that remains that the situation was not caused by one man or one institution. The civil society groups rightly observed that “Emefiele’s policies have truncated the rent-seeking ability of many of these economic parasites and saboteurs. And we believe it is for this singular reason that both Emefiele and the CBN are being vilified in the most unfair and disgraceful manner by a sponsored group of anarchists.
“Nigerians have been taken for a ride for too long. Our collective patrimony has been cornered by a few looters for too long. We can no longer stand idly by and watch these thieves, in collaboration with foreign neo-colonialists and imperialists, keep the masses of our people under perpetual bondage. This is the time to free Nigeria and its people from the dirty hands and greedy mouths of a few.”
They believe that “given their inability to hide their identities these thieves have vowed to hound Emefiele for daring to destroy their criminal activities. May God never allow them to succeed,” the groups said.
They believe rightly, that the list of 41 items not eligible for forex at the CBN did not go down well with Emefiele’s detractors, as the elite and business moguls had been depleting the country’s forex reserves by aggressively importing goods, which could be easily produced in Nigeria.
“By their action, these profiteers have killed jobs in Nigeria and created jobs abroad. They have exported prosperity abroad and imported poverty into their fatherland. But as long as their huge profit margins are guaranteed, they do not care. What Emefiele and his team have done is to say that we can no longer import unemployment and export wealth out of Nigeria. These looters and their sponsors have used all sorts of guises to register several BDCs with which they drain foreign exchange from the CBN and use such to transfer their loot abroad.” And they are right: It is only in Nigeria that BDCs expect government (CBN) to give them foreign exchange before they do business.
LEADERSHIP
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