Governor
Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State came down hard on proponents of Naira
devaluation Thursday in Lagos as he urged Nigerians to rally round the
Federal Government in its determination to change the nation’s insatiable appetite for foreign goods.
Federal Government in its determination to change the nation’s insatiable appetite for foreign goods.
In its address at The Cable Colloquium, a policy dialogue on the exchange rate, whose theme
is The Naira on Trial:To Devalue or Not?, Oshiomhole reasoned that if
devaluation could not bail the country out of its economic woes in 1986
when the currency was at par with the Dollars, how can it do so now that
it is over N300 to the Dollar?
“I believe that the drug you administered
on your child in 1986, if it didn’t cure the child, to bring exactly
the same drug in 2016 would be foolishness,” he said.
Lampooning the proponents of the currency
devaluation, the governor said the debate was needless as it was
triggered by speculators and those with idle funds which they didn’t
work for.
His words: “What triggered the
conversation was that a couple of things have happened in this
environment, arising from the decisions by politicians and their
collaborators in the private sector within the community of the elite.
We were told by these wizkids that, when we devalue, everything will
change. From one (Naira) to one(Dollar); to today’s official rate of one(Dollar) to N198, if we now take stock, we should ask ourselves what has changed?
“If devaluation was the answer, from one
to one, we didn’t find the answer; from one to eight, we didn’t find the
answer. By 1999, from one to 100 , we didn’t find the answer. When
Soludo came, he said he was going to peg the Naira at N125 to the Dollar
and he rolled out economic statistics to celebrate that. So from N125
then , we are now at N200.Nigeria has not been delivered.”
Quoting data from the Central Bank of
Nigeria (CBN) to support his assertion, Oshiomhole, who was the keynote
speaker at the event, blamed the current foreign exchange (forex)
restriction on demand and supply imbalance.
“I understand that our total receipts
from forex inflow is less than $1billion- about $700million-and outflow
stands at $4billion per month. So if you earn less than $1billion and
your outflow remains at about $4billion, obviously, in the next one
year, our foreign reserves will be zero. The realisation of this danger
is that all of a sudden, everybody is discussing whether or not to
devalue”, he stated.
He urged Nigerians to cut their dependency on foreign goods in order to conserve foreign exchange:
“During the IMF debate in the 80s, Chief
Olu Falae lectured us that the beauty of devaluation, when we face the
kind of crisis that we face, is that people who have perfected the act
of consuming what they don’t produce, the only way to force them to
re-orientate their consumption in the way that will reconcile
sophistication in consumption to the rather primitive level of
production was to use some of these instruments to force them to think
differently.
“I think what we require is what we
presently have. President Buhari, in his clear determination to compel
all of us to think again, to re-orientate our consumption and to
reconcile with current realities, those who live on speculation, we have
no business supporting them. For people to take our policies seriously,
I think we must, as a matter of general attitude, move away from the
regime in which we made policies in the morning and reverse them in the
evening”
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