What we have seen is that instead of banks channelling what we call excess liquidity in the system into the productive or certain targeted sectors of the economy, what they are doing is either placing these monies in treasury bills or even investing them at the CBN Windows”

I would like to bring to your attention, the urgent need to upgrade the equipment, training and logistics of our Armed Forces and Security Services to enable them more forcefully to confront this (Boko Haram) threat”. “For this reason, I seek the concurrence of the National Assembly for external borrowing of not more than $1bn, including government to government arrangements for this upgrade”.

The Financial Punch of Monday 8th September, 2014, carried a story titled “12 banks earn N1.4tn in six months”; the report explained that the published trading results showed that 12 banks made a combined after tax profit of N223bn between January and June 2014.

This week, we will feature excerpts from comments of three regular readers who obviously agonise on the seeming aloofness of government and its economic Team to the selfless and realistic suggestions made in this column to induce economic growth and rescue millions of our countrymen from the jaws of poverty

By HENRY BOYO Dealing with the excess liquidity challenge requires innovative approaches in view of the source of the problem.  One potentially enduring solution, which would avoid the creation of new money and boost the naira value in the foreign exchange market, relates to the allocation of foreign exchange earned from oil to the three […]

A popular indigenous artiste cautioned in one of his lyrics that you cannot sow cocoyam and hope to harvest rice. Notwithstanding the above wise counsel, Nigerians inexplicably hope and believe that in spite of over 70% of our population, reportedly, currently living on less than $2/day, our country could still blossom to become one of the top 20 economies six years from now.

Our parlous economic state has been attributed by some observers to our heavy dependence on increasing oil revenue and our inability to stimulate the performance of our industrial and agricultural subsectors, particularly the small and medium enterprises and thereby, also diversify the productive sectors of our economy

In the wake of the 2008 banking crises, the Central Bank created over N4000bn fresh Naira supply, inspite of the attendant inflationary threat, to rescue the Nigerian banking sector. Evidently, however, the bountiful profit figures declared lately by several banks would be clear testimony that, business is presently good in the sub-sector, particularly when compared with the relatively modest profit figures and systemic challenges in other industrial and commercial sub-sectors.

The regular readers of “Economic Renaissance” will already be very familiar with our strident unceasing advocacy that a simple reform of our payments system will positively transform the economic and social welfare of our people beyond the faltering expectations of the current managers of our economy.

The Federation Accounts Allocation Committee last week approved the sum of over N755bn for sharing among the three tiers of government. Ordinarily, the distribution of this relatively sizable revenue would elicit hope that the economy will become positively impacted, as the various tiers of government would be funded to achieve their budget expectations.