The public’s usual refrain to rising prices is that “manufacturers/suppliers/farmers have increased prices of their respective goods and services; the supplier is evidently the villain in public consciousness; it would indeed require the patience of Job to convince most Nigerians that such condemnation was misplaced and it may even be more difficult to put the blame for high cost of funds at the doorstep of Central Bank. Consequently, it would be unbelievable to even suggest that CBN is infact the ‘devil in our economic workshop’.

There has been a palpable feeling of economic uncertainty in the land, since the Central Bank officially devalued the Naira exchange rate from N155 to N168 last week; the public’s anxiety is probably, the recognition of the pervasive impact of the Naira/Dollar exchange rate on the general cost of goods and motor-spirits (aka petrol) in a heavily import dependent economy such as ours.

In the wake of public concerns on the impact of tumbling oil price on government revenue and expenditure in the 2015 budget, the Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Dr Okonjo Iweala, recently assured a joint Legislative Committee on Finance and National Planning that “we have calculated that in order to help us regain stability, we need a minimum of about $5bn.”

The CBN recently restricted direct sales of the federation’s official dollar reserves to some sectors of the economy; consequently, the importation of electronics, information technology, generators, and telecom equipment, finished products and invisible transactions will henceforth be funded with more costly dollars from the Interbank foreign Exchange market.

There are genuine public concerns that with the receding sales price of crude oil in the international market, in recent months, our heavy dependence on oil revenue may diminish any promising prospect for inclusive economic growth in Nigeria.

Inspite of the assurances of Okonjo-Iweala, the Finance and Co-ordinating Minister of the Economy that Nigeria is not broke, there are concerns that falling crude oil prices may in fact belie the Minister’s apparent confidence. Indeed, crude oil which accounts for over 50% of Federal revenue has dipped below $90/barrel after remaining stable between $100-110/barrel for over two years.

The feelers from snippets of information so far available from the 2014-15 budget projections clearly suggest that, inspite of dwindling revenue due to prevailing lower crude oil prices and output, Nigerians may still be compelled to dedicate almost N1500bn or over 20% of next year’s federal budget to the intangible and unsubstantiated benefit of subsidising fuel consumption nationwide.

Labour Unions in modern day nation states have the prime objective of enhancing and protecting the social and economic welfare of the working class, who invariably constitute, by far, the majority of the population.

In a newspaper report titled “Nigeria rejects EPA over $1.3tn Revenue Loss” (Daily Independent Newspaper of 15/8/2014, Pg. 30), the Director General of Manufacturer’s Association, Mr. Remi Ogunmefun commended the Minister of Trade and Industry, Mr. Olusegun Aganga for “reiterating government’s commitment to pursue the implementation of the Nigerian Industrial Revolution Plan” which accommodates “local content policies and transformation in the agricultural sector among others.”

Pius Adesanmi, a budding literary icon was the guest speaker at the “Second State of the Nation” lecture organized recently by Pastor Tunde Bakare-led Save Nigeria Group. Adesanmi, a Professor at Carlton University, Canada, chose the title “Reparations: What Nigerians Owe the Tortoise” as his theme. I invite you to share in an experience that turned out to be an insightful and sobering verbal interactive satire.

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 […]