Paper money or fiat currency is still the greatest innovation conceived by man. Imagine Nigeria being some type of human zoo of sort that still trades by barter. If we import loads of Apple’s iPhone 7, how many truckloads of cattle will northern Nigeria exchange or barrels of oil will southern Nigeria exchange for their own share of the iPhone imports? When Toyota or Apple labours to innovate that next big trailblazer, it is because they know if it succeeds, they can easily recoup their money.
Fast forward to 2016, assume the naira exchanges officially for N300 to a US dollar (it is 304 as I write this). Therefore, if N3 equals 1 US cents, the naira in your pocket is devalued by 99.7 per cent to a dollar (complete devaluation is 100 per cent). Fellow countrymen and women, you can see that your naira is finished! That is why experts say the fastest and easiest way to decimate any country is to destroy her currency. Any rational citizen should ask how we got ourselves into this mess.
Well, such a person should not look too far. We live in a country where serious technical issues are approached with commonsense. Folks like Ben Murray Bruce who champion this ideology in a way insult the sensibilities of Nigerians. Commonsense protagonists have solutions to every problem even in what they have no training. You see, the white man believes for any serious development, there must be painstaking RESEARCH. No, not commonsense! No wonder they call it RESEARCH and DEVELOPMENT, not commonsense and development because any serious endeavour demands a methodological approach to its solutions. Sony does this, General Electric does this, the US and the Swedish governments just to name a few, all do this. Back to why the naira in your pocket is not worth more than the sand under your feet, it is simple: Our institutions and government do not engage in any serious thinking and despise folks that do.
The CBN has an R/D department that has tried to do some good work most times publishing reports that indict its Board, which should shock any serious government. But why should the CBN governor, Aso Rock or the National Assembly care? Candidly, these folks are busy feathering their nests while looking for a 1 plus 1 answer. In some of the reports, it says the CBN monetary policy is DEAD pointblank! (see page 40 here ). Ponder why our banks pay licence fee of N25bn only to be selling recharge cards through short codes displacing the petty trader by the street corner and going into online market hubs in order to kill off the likes of Konga and Jumia? While you are there looking for a 1 plus 1 answer, banks collect 30 per cent interest from loans to pay you 0 per cent monthly interest on your own savings.
In a recession year, most banks financial year profits have bettered 2015 performance; some have even gone on to dole out bonuses to staff. Tell me where else in the world can you see this?
You have a bank governor who has thousand units of shares in a regulated bank; although in cases like this, they will tell you it is with a trust. I usually tell my friends if Julian Assange of Wikileaks should hack the CBN mails, the racket there should make anyone spew. Other board members are simply there because they retired as finance directors from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, so you see that how to collect oil dollar inflow is utmost for these people than the value of your naira. Then, below the management board are silver spoon kids that sojourned back with a finance degree for which SaharaReporters unearthed the last recruitment scam and Aso Rock saw as normal.
Should we even bother about them? It was a former State governor during a Save Nigeria Group event in 2013 that aptly summed it up that, “We the elites send our kids for studies abroad to come back as misfits”. In a place like the UK, the Bank of England interviewed candidates for the plum job and Mark Carney, a Canadian, came out best and pronto, he was appointed governor. It beats a rational mind why these Nigerian silver spoon kids cannot fit into such societies but wait to get home for daddy to desecrate public institutions. If a professor friend that consults for the CBN can confess that he still mixes up the causes with types of inflation, one wonders why Ibe Kachikwu or Atiku Abubakar’s children should care if inflation is galloping at more than 10 per cent per annum.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Company (places populated by quota system/nepotism) have come out to say they did their bid in ADVISING Nigerians about MMM and bought media spaces to lament how 30 per cent is a Ponzi scheme. These quota system folks are not educated enough to know that anywhere there is a circular flow of funds so far there is ample LIQUIDITY, money has a multiplier effect. Little wonder why money generated by monetary authorities (and indeed even by a system like MMM) is called high-powered money. It is needless to debate that in fact, it is loans that create deposits not vice versa. You can now see why money is man’s greatest invention!
Enough of the digression! Currently, the CBN and other failed Nigerian institutions have come out to lambast Nigerians for failing to heed their advice. What these recession gatekeepers do not know is that already sound central banks in progressive climes have all reduced money supply due to the seasonality effect from festive periods due to high money velocity in order to maintain inflation rates of less than three per cent. Even with that, if you analyse their data, you still find seasonality trends in MMM money supply. The MMM was right to have paused its payout accounts but to the contrary, our CBN is busy pumping worthless naira into the system. As you read this, inflation has gone up again in the last quarter and mind you, sustained inflation is an all-round monetary phenomenon (or problem).
Millions of Nigerians in the MMM community need not harbour any fear over of a lack of liquidity by January when the system comes on as planned. Even if there is a lack of liquidity in the Nigerian platform, the MMM can still credit account holders with Bitcoin from other countries. Is it not even better to dump the naira for the finance minister and the CBN governor of depression (of course, expect a negative GDP this quarter) and diversify your portfolio to Bitcoin and then for the US greenback. The advent of digital money has enough safeguards to make for a robust MMM system. Pressing the panic button can crash even the best of financial systems but this is a needless self-destruct route. The great John Maynard Keynes called it the ‘Herd effect’. I implore Nigerians to ignore their failed institutions.
Udoh is a development expert based in Lagos.
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