Eight months into President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration, the naira is still wobbling, compared with other curencies any one can think about! Quoting the president who said, ‘’l know the way’’ during the 2023 presidential campaign, this is the time to match words with action. For many Nigerians, all the economic jargons and other unfounded economic theorems no longer make sense to the ordinary man who now struggles on daily basis to survive.
The most challenging problem facing the country at the moment is the economy, because of shortage of foreign exchange, coupled with inability of the President and his economic team to stimulate local production. At present, foreign companies, including Shell petroleum have announced their exit from the country, yet, government is behaving as if nothing has happened. The foreign airlines are threatening to quit because the airlines cannot remit their funds trapped in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), to their home countries, and the problem continues.
In all this, we are yet to see steps taken to make the naira stronger, and also put in place adequate measures to promote local production. This is what the country needs at this point in time. The idea of depending on imported products, which has been the case for many years, should be jettisoned. The only thing required to bring the economy out of its present comatose is to muster the political will to take the right decisions and block all leakages. Unfortunately, it is only in Nigeria that those in authority speculate the price of fuel, whether it would go up or down, even when the product is sourced locally. What it shows is that government officials are not in firm grip of the reality on ground, especially those among us whose bread are buttered, so to speak.
However, whether we sell off all our common patrimony, like the refineries, power plants and other national assets, the economy will remain battered, except the leaders take the bull by the horns and do the right thing. For example, the budgeting of several millions of naira to import choice cars for legislative members, renovating and building of the president and vice president mansions that ran into several billions of naira in addition to bogus foreign trips at this time of economic crunch, certainly, may have contributed to the fall of the naira. All this amount to capital flight, and no country survives with this kind of economic policy that is tied to the apron string of foreign competitors.
The sale of the dollars which is way above the naira, the worsening economic confusion whereby we use the naira to buy naira, points to the fact that solution to our economic woes are not even in the horizon, except the trend is reversed and fast too. The increasing security challenge has further compounded the problem, as large sums of naira are now in the hands of terror groups within and across borderlines of neighouring countries. While we bemoan the exit of consumer goods giants, Procter and Gamble, followed by GSK SmithKline and others that may follow at the dawn of the new year, Government should be serious with its economic policies.
Hoarding of the dollars and the naira should be unthinkable. Politics is over. What the people want now is true leadership and directions because, the president told Nigerians that we should not pity him for he asked for the job. That the dollar is currently selling at #1,400 indeed, does not speak well of the present government. We call for right, sustainable and developmental economic policies. That Nigeria is still a consuming nation with all her endowments is not adding on all fronts. We want to see this government fulfilling its promise by making sure that all the economic indices working against our national goal and growth are reversed for the better.
