The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

BRF and abiku Discos

Last week’s putdown of the club of incompetent operators at the lower end of the electricity market by Power, Works and Housing Minister, Babatunde Fashola, at their 15th edition of their monthly power sector operators’ meeting which held in Jos, capital of Plateau State could not have come as a shock to many. Indeed, to millions of Nigerians forced to endure the tyranny of the clueless operators, it was something long expected. However, if the operators saw it coming via the minister’s hardly suppressed irritation with the long running campaign by their cartel – so-called the Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANED), what they could not have bargained for was the text and tone of the minister’s language at the Jos meeting.

The minister’s frustrations, although somewhat understandable, is however coming late in the day. Clearly, the issue isn’t just that the club of players have broken all the elements in the rulebook to deserve being shown the way out, there are, as yet, no signs that they know what needs to be done to take the sector out of the current morass.

As I observed on this page not too long ago, the Discos in particular seems to have done better in procuring alibis to explain away their incompetence than they have done at implementing the Service Level Agreements (SLA) made with the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) – a critical agreement – which guaranteed the metering of electricity consumers as well as significantly reducing the collection and technical losses in the sector within five years. This is not to talk of the investments which electricity consumers were told to envisage under the privatised entities, and which provided the justification for their sale in the first instance.

That these are nowhere forthcoming several years after leaves little wonder why the system is still stuck on the obsolete equipment and business methods, starved as it were of the new thinking needed to turn things around.

For an administration that promised change, the realisation of the difficult route not taken must truly sobering more so as begins its countdown to its mid-term barely two weeks from now. However, that the bunch of clueless operators would dare to mount the high road of offensive in spite of their proven incompetence, and this after taking hundreds of billions of naira from the public till with nothing to show merely extends the frontier of popular Nigerian narrative about actions not carrying consequences.

Clearly, if the minister’s statement at the Jos meeting is any revealing, it is the futility of putting the electricity consumer’s hope in a club that continues to demonstrate incurable disdain not only the rules of the market but the elementary principles of fairness and equity. For while they could be forgiven their routine offering of old wives fables to rationalise brazen incompetence, not so their latest vocation in pushing an agenda so egregiously injurious to the public cause.

Some examples –from the minister’s Jos statement – would suffice.

First is the Discos claim to exclusive rights on their distribution areas – a claim so laughable were it not to be tragic. Imagine an anaemic Enugu Disco seeking to contest the space with the 188-megawatt Geometric Power, Aba over power supply to that industrial enclave in the Igbo heartland; and this at a time the Disco could not provide minimum service households in the East! Talk of asking the good people of Aba to wait for a disco that has neither demonstrated sufficient understanding of its rationale nor taken any first step forward!

Listen to Fashola: “Your statement does not address the illogic of standing in the way of a consumer seeking to get for himself what the service provider, Disco, has failed or is unable to give them.

“What is important is that the law is followed, consultations are held, and decisions are taken. No Disco has exclusive rights over any area and its ability to retain an area must be consistent with its ability to provide service to the area.”

Second is the contentious issue of a central pool – an escrow account – into which electricity tariffs are paid.

On the surface, the Discos would seem to have a point here. If anything, the proposition is potentially problematic. The alternative, going by the experiences of other operators in the industry, is however even more so. For those who see the decision to centralise and escrow power sector revenues as anathema, this is how Fashola puts it to the Discos: “…the escrow condition was agreed by you with the central bank as a condition for offering you stabilisation funds by way of loans to fund the business you invested in because commercial banks were reluctant to do so…

“What you also failed to state was that the loan was at 10 per cent interest rate which is well below commercial rates.

“What you also failed to state was that you also agreed under that arrangement to establish letters of credit to guarantee future payments to NBET and the TCN Market Operations, and that the agreed commercial terms of the letters of credit authorises NBET and TCN Market Operations to draw on the letters of credit for any default in payment to them, and that such defaults have occurred and continue to occur.”

So, what do in the case of the glaring breach of duty to the National Bulk Electricity Trader (NBET) and the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) by Discos?

Allow them– including gas suppliers– to go under and by extension imperil what is left of the system?

To quote Fashola again: “Your statement did not tell members of the public that these companies were not getting paid because you were not remitting all what you are supposed to be remitting to the market operators.”

These are just a few of the problems nurtured by the Discos. Ever heard of operators seeking to reap where it has not sown?

To go back to the main point: neither anger nor frustration would solve the problem any more than the pampering would. Only effective, even-handed regulatory action would. Again, as I noted in the article earlier referenced, the challenge is for the Buhari administration to find a way to wrest the citizens from the clutches of the clueless operators in a fair, transparent manner, shorn of abuse and arbitrariness. The situation, I noted is akin to a case of a terminally sick patient; while a surgical intervention may not necessarily guarantee that the patient would live, it does offer a shot at life; the same way that the option of doing nothing would most certainly hasten the demise.

ANED or not – I guess it would not be a bad idea for the government to make examples of one or two laggard Discos if only to prove that it means business.

May 16, 2017
Lawmakers or undertakers?

Just as many had predicted, Friday May 5, passed without the National Assembly transmitting a final copy of the 2017 Appropriation Bill to the executive for assent into law. For a budget whose parameters both parties had assured Nigerians were far less contentious, or if you like, disagreeable than the one preceding it, it has certainly been a hell of a waiting since the formal laying of the budget document before the two chambers of the National Assembly on December 14, 2016.

So much for the feet-shuffling of the past few days, the best we had was the listing of the “presentation of the report” as the first item on the Senate’s Order Paper last Thursday. Even at that, like school children faced with the prospects of writing an examination for which they were totally unprepared, Senate Leader, Ahmed Lawan, merely caused to be announced that it be stepped down and taken “by the Grace of God” today (Tuesday) since the Danjuma Goje-led appropriation committee were “currently” meeting with their counterparts in the House of Representatives on the last-minute harmonisation of the budget proposal.

Imagine that happening barely 24 hours to the expiration of the 2016 Appropriation Act. This is a budget that Senate President and chairman of the National Assembly, Bukola Saraki had promised way back in February would be returned to the President for his assent by the end of March.

To our ‘distinguished’ parliamentarians, there was – as far as they could see – no cause for alarm.

No risk of an embarrassing shutdown of government of the kind that would spark outrage on the streets – thanks to Section 82 of the constitution which allows the president to authorise withdrawal from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the purpose of meeting expenditure necessary to carry on services of the government until the coming into operation of the new budget.

No sense of urgency or emergency for an economy which shrunk by 1.5 percent in 2016, the first full-year drop in 25 years according to International Monetary Fund; a country whose infrastructure situation would best pass as antediluvian, whose real sector chokes from the unprecedented infrastructure deficit; an economy that has only lately begun to show modest signs of crawling out of the recession.

And to further imagine that this is only the second money bill in the series of which the minders of the economy had sought to spend it out of recession! A budget said to be based on the Buhari administration’s Economic Recovery and Growth Strategy; a plan said to provide “a clear road map of policy actions and steps designed to bring the economy out of recession and to a path of steady growth and prosperity”; held hostage by the institution decidedly holding both the yam and the knife!

But then, it is not as if the current holdout has not been long in coming. It started with the bickering over the administration’s 2016-19 external borrowing plan of $29.960 billion; it extended to the 2017-2019 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper which the National Assembly found incomprehensible; followed by the Hammed Ali – the Customs Comptroller-General and the uniform sideshow; and then of course the Ibrahim Magu confirmation affair –all climaxing in the April 20 raid on the residence of the chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriation, Danjuma Goje by the police during which some laptops and 18 documents said to contain the work of the committee on the 2017 budget were said to have been removed.

We know what happened after: the august body reportedly threatened to dump the process in its entirety – until the police returned all documents carted away in the raid!

Talk of a parliament that would rather major in minors at a time of dire emergencies!

By the way, here is what yours truly wrote on November 8, last year at the onset of the crisis:

“If we had thought the nation was done with the nightmare of budget documents missing in transit, the topsy-turvy of an exercise whose final product was mangled to the point of rendering it of dubious provenance, we are again learning that nothing has changed in any shape or form about the annual ritual called budgeting. Even at that, there must be something spectacularly enervating in the antics of an administration that prefers drama over substance; an administration that has now made a habit of draping signature incompetence in the colours of patriotism. This is where the latest fire-fights and turf wars in the count-down to Budget 2017 is not only wearisome, it is one distraction Nigerians would gladly do without”.

The wheels – as they say – have now turned full cycle.

Add to the confused and utterly bungling executive branch, the insufferable arrogance of a body which would not baulk at deploying crude blackmail to achieve its base objectives, and at a time APC, the party in government is practically missing in action, the result is the creeping disaster currently set to overwhelm us.

As for the six-point something trillion on which the nation pins its hope for survival, expect no miracle – or rather, no shortage of excuses for non-delivery on the budget objectives whenever it is finally passed into law.

So much for the perennial circus.

At a time the world is moving at the jet speed, it is alright for our lawmakers to live in pretence that all is well. And for the executive to imagine that it has all the time in the world to fix the problems. Together, they can choose to kick down the road – the burden of Nigeria’s 30-year roadmap infrastructure development plan – the National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIIMP), projected to cost a record $2 trillion (N398.1 trillion) over the next three decades. Isn’t it precisely what their predecessors did that landed us in the current hole?

And now with oil price showing steady recovery, why bother again with the old symptoms of the Dutch curse that has held the economy down? Why expend valuable rigour on fixing things when you can enjoy the current bazar? Never mind the talk about mid-term being barely three weeks hence; why bother when you still have the whole of two years to get things moving?

Who is talking about change?

May 9, 2017
Soludo: Wiser after the fact?

The current situation of more than 10 percent premium in the parallel market rates compared to the official rates is simply unacceptable. While we hope that some of the structural constraints (especially relating to the trade policy and practices) will be eliminated over time, the CBN has resolved to take some concrete steps to further liberalize the market to ensure greater efficiency of the market and drastic reduction in the premium between the official/interbank rates under WDAS, and the Bureau de change/parallel market rates. Our strategy is to ensure increased supply of Forex to all markets and also reduce the demand pressure in the parallel market by reviewing or eliminating many of the restrictions imposed on users of the official market. This will make many of the hitherto ineligible transactions in the official market eligible, thereby reducing the pressure on the parallel market” Chukwuma Charles Soludo, March 27, 2006.

“Nigeria must get out of multiple exchange rates and we must eliminate the premium, get it back on track at a competitive exchange rate regime. The uncertainty that is created by that is so enormous; and with the oil price rising and with the increase in oil earnings, this is the time to take bold steps and do the needful…We have done it before and it is just going back to it. If it (the template) is not broken, why mend it? Get back and eliminate the multiple exchange rate regime, eliminate the premium, or at least significantly reduce it to not more than between three to maximum of five per cent premium between the parallel and official exchange rates”.

That was Chukwuma Charles Soludo speaking in Lagos the other day as chairman of the Economic Discourse organised by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN).

Now, if we excuse his trademark conceitedness as indeed his dig at Godwin Emefiele’s CBN, not so his pretence at being oblivious to the completely altered canvas in which he expects his worthy successor to hatch his lifelong fixation.

From being a leader who pushed admirably to get a rather difficult job done, to one apparently bitten by the Nigerian bug to the extent that he now sounds more like an emergency crusader with an undisclosed agenda, (just imagine the hubris regarding the claim about so-called magical template or the veiled attempt to rewrite a most recent history!), the wheel has turned full cycle for our man. How about an individual that has left the stage but would not stop at writing own report card but would rather cart away the trophy before the game is called?
Talk about our elite’s dalliance with hubris!

Those are not the only things wrong with the Soludo message.

As far as I can see – everything – is wrong!

It starts with the disingenuous attempt to frame the issue (about multiple forex rates – that is) as something that either started yesterday or a relapse of a disease long cured when in fact it is the same stubborn disease that has not only defied cure, but continues to present in different forms depending on the vitality of the economy-host! Was that not why the ex-CBN governor could frame it as a problem in 2006?

How about the so-called Soludo magic template – which if it existed at all, it was at best an accidental or chance occurrence? One only needs to recall that oil was price doing reasonably well (I think around $90 per barrel) in the Soludo years. Also, production held fairly steady at some two million barrels per day then – the reason we could build an impressive war-chest of $60 billion and with it a guarantee of 30-odd months of import cover.

Remember, there was just about enough forex to import anything from carpets to tooth-picks with our hordes of parallel market operators left to scramble for pickings in what was at best a marginal market. Yes, the Soludo magic worked at some point; the rates appeared to have converged at one point (I can’t exactly recall when now).

Today, we can look back in time to ask – why was it not sustained; or better still – sustainable?

The answer has now emerged: like now, the apex bank as the main forex supplier could not satisfy the demand. The chief factor, as it now appears, is the degree to which the rulers made fetish of forex. Then, the dollar was important – but only to a point. Today, it is everything. With the economy virtually dollarised and with billions of hoarded naira – mostly stolen – chasing fewer and fewer international currencies no thanks to the slump in oil prices, a thousand and one CBNs could never have met the local demand. This – coupled with the criminal complicity of the banks – is what gives the black market the wing to fly. It explains why the naira continues to respond in fits and starts despite the apex bank’s activism; it explains the current scepticism about its sustainability. This is what – amazingly – Soludo pretend not to see!

The truth of course is that the Soludo message represents a barely disguised attempt at reinforcing the age-long fetish about forex and the phantom ‘allocative’ efficiency of the so-called market (packaged as liberalisation) even when supply is finite and demand indeterminable. This is where the pretence that the malaise could be cured, not by taking on the abusers of the forex trade, but by abandoning the very institutional controls designed to bring some order, comes across as curious.

When are we going to stop making the business of forex an end itself as against being a means to an end? Shouldn’t we be talking more now about putting in place enduring policies to get our factories revving full throttle as against the current focus on forex management?

Does the present course not obfuscate the real debate about what ails the Nigerian economy? Isn’t the old but familiar course responsible for the current situation in which the economy lack the vital appendages on which to stand, one so utterly dependent and hopelessly vegetative that it currently survives on life support offered by petro-dollars?

Imagine that we are already beginning to act like the drunk that has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Thanks to the steady improvement in oil prices and hence the reserves, there are already pressures on the prodigal country to go back to the old paths –again. Yes, the chants are becoming louder as to why we must go back to the ruinous path of conspicuous consumption; to bring back the 41-odd banned items, to remove the very buffers that served us well in the difficult days; the humongous subsidies on those expensive vacations on the Riviera!
As it was in the beginning, so shall it be….

May 2, 2017
Xenophobia at our door

If the Nigerian federal government ever harboured the thought about being “on top’ of the mindless rage against their citizens in the former apartheid enclave, the brutal slaughter of a Nigerian auto mechanic, Rasak Ajao, by some South Africans in Polokwane, Limpopo Province on April 6, ought to have removed that illusion. For while the inept ANC government of Jacob Zuma continues to deny that xenophobia constitute one of its directing principles, and the Nigerian government joins in mouthing the nonsense about engagement, the picture that comes out is as grotesque as it is unmistakeable: Xenophobia is actually the way ordinary South Africans and their hypocritical elites live and have their being. Less familiar of course is the benign form of the virus daily served on Nigerians right on their soil – by the country’s ill-tutored consular officials.
Truly, I had heard different versions of the same story of ill-treatment of Nigerians by South African officials at their embassy in Lagos. A fellow Nigerian who was billed to attend a Motor Show sponsored by a South African company had the trip aborted as the embassy only released her passport days after the event was concluded. A cousin who had journeyed from Benin to Lagos for visa was told to wait until after the conclusion of the training programme – never mind that it was the very reason for the trip and for which he had already spent a fortune – to obtain the visa! A company executive had to storm the embassy to demand for his passports after the latter withheld same for weeks. His ‘crime’ was that he visited a third country – I believe Swaziland – in the course of an earlier visit. The dumb officials couldn’t understand why another sovereign country would oblige him their visa from their country!
I would get my bitter serving of their pill in March. Late February, yours truly embarked on a six-week vacation that was to include a two-week visit to the former apartheid enclave. For a 40-day holiday, I thought I had just about enough time to apply for a visa. After all, their website said something about six days minimum to process the visa. In all, I assumed that the maximum would be no more than 10 working days or at worst 15, just as any thoughts of denial of visa were far from my mind. My mistake.
Confident of my bona fide, I sent in my completed application at the VFS office in Lagos February 13. And then the waiting game began. One week stretched to two and then three; yet no word. The agents – VFS – said they had no control. The embassy, I was told, was a no-go as they don’t deal with individual applicants. By the fourth week, I could no longer accept that the situation.
By the fifth week, I had clearly had enough. I called the agents – VFS – which advised I call the embassy directly. A day, two days, the embassy wouldn’t pick my call. Frustrated, I called VFS people who insisted I keep trying. Finally, on March 16, a lady picked the phone. After collecting my details, she assured me I would hear from them. True to her word, I did – barely two hours later: a text message requesting me to proceed to the VFS for my passport. With 10 days left of the six-week vacation, I settled on making the best of what had turned to a bad situation. What I got instead was a shocker: application refused! Reason? Some silly incomprehensible nonsense about some transactions in my bank statement not being credible!
Let me be clear. I perfectly understood the bit about issuance of visa being a privilege. In the age of terrorism and social cataclysm, I do understand why embassies would go the extra mile to keep undesirable visitors at bay. However, I also do understand that the visa hurdle is not meant to be an iron curtain to deny legitimate visitors entry otherwise the whole point about opening consular offices would be pointless.
Thanks to South Africa’s affirmative action, I have heard that a good number of the consular staff are barely of high school grade and so could barely read local newspapers; even at that, one considers it utterly disgraceful that consular officials could not make the distinction between a journalist/ columnist with a national newspaper and the hordes of potential economic migrants said to daily besiege their embassy.
So much for my conceit. I had visited the country before together with my wife and three children. Moreover; I had a letter of invitation from my younger brother – a specialist family physician, including a letter of introduction from my employer – this newspaper – confirming my employment status. Besides, I had I had multiple visas on my passport – including United States and Canada –which the South Africans were apparently fastidious about and which they insisted on my showing proof with photocopies in the application. Now, at age 50+, I would consider myself effectively out of that broad category that has become the South African nightmare: the class of Nigerian professional supposedly predisposed to stealing their women; not excluding his compatriot street-hustler who do drugs in the country’s poverty and crime infested suburbs.
Anyway, the accompanying note said I could re-apply within 10 working days if I was not satisfied with their decision! So much for consolation after waiting for 31-days!
Ask anyone who has dared to apply for their visa, they would tell you that my story is typical. I must admit though that things are shades better than they were some 10 years ago when officials behaved like emperors and treated people like they have no use for their time. I recall an instance when I had to wait at the embassy till 10 pm for a 2 pm appointment!
Never mind the so-called principle of reciprocity, (forget the lie about African brotherhood), South Africans do not think much of us or our government. Told that some 20 Nigerians had been killed in the renewed wave of xenophobia, South Africa Home Affairs Minister, Malusi Gigaba reportedly asked Nigerians to stop “complaining too much about the renewed attack on Nigerian nationals in the country”. Daring Big Brother to do its worst he warned: “This is the discussion South Africa would not want to get into as it would turn ugly…I am not privy to the figures from the Nigerian government and how they collected them…I do not think it is the discussion we want to get into. It will turn out very bad. Countries should desist from pointing fingers at each other”!
Still think xenophobia is not official? How about the City of Johannesburg mayor, Herman Mashaba’s December call on illegal immigrants to leave his city? “You see, for me, when I call these criminals, criminals, I want them to understand that they are criminals,” Mashaba was quoted to have said, adding, “They are holding our country to ransom and I am going to be the last South African to allow it.”
Or the Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini’s devastating riposte to Big Brother: “The fact that there were countries that played a role in the country’s struggle for liberation should not be used as an excuse to create a situation where foreigners are allowed to inconvenience locals”.
The South Africans are right. The cups of our brother migrants are full and brimming over – their sins being no more than choosing to live in the unwelcoming country. And truly, many of them are known to do stuff from the petty to the heinous. But then, are they more sinning than local South African companies who rape and pillage our economy under the guise of foreign investment?
It is alright for politicians and the elite to look away as hoodlums chase the kwerekwere (foreigner) with arrows and machetes in the inner cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. With their corporate interests doing murder and mayhem in the Nigerians economy, I hope someone, somewhere would remember the rule of unanticipated consequences.
And sure it would happen, sooner than later!

April 25, 2017
Naira: Which magic?

I got an interesting call from my account officer in one of the so-called new generation banks Friday last week. It was a follow up to an earlier discussion on the newly introduced forex policy introduced by Godwin Emefiele’s Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) days before. Should I be interested in purchasing a Personal Travel Allowance (PTA) for a proposed trip, the lady dutifully informed, her bank would be more than willing to facilitate. Few hours later, a cousin whose ward is studying in Canada would also call to share a similar message from her bank: the bank is now open to process Form A for her ward’s school fees.
Welcome, at last to Emefiele’s world of magical realism – a world where the unthinkable just happened. Check out the package: direct additional funding to banks to meet the needs of Nigerians for Personal and Business Travel, Medical and School fees; retail transactions to be settled at a rate not exceeding 20 per cent above the interbank rate. Something that is not only too good to be true but would have been difficult to contemplate six months back!
As one would imagine, the effects have been electrifying: under one week, the dollar got a good hiding; from N520 to the dollar early last week, the currency in obedience to the law of gravity is currently down to N460!
You know the story of how we got to this point. From the dizzying heights of more than $100 a barrel late 2014, the price of Nigeria’s crude tumbled to below $29 sometime in January 2016. Like the drunk after a binge, we woke up to find our fiscal defences all gone. For a country hung on imports, we ended up in a situation in which our foreign reserve trailed behind our import bills. The apex bank, fearing a run on it had placed innumerable hurdles all of which sought to restrict those who could access the shrinking forex piggy bank. First, it declared 41 odd items ineligible for forex through the interbank window. When that failed to have the desired effect, the apex bank, unable to boost the forex stock, went for additional administrative controls to tighten access. Never mind the periodic table of forex allocation published in the newspapers – no one could be sure of who is getting what: not the manufacturers for whom the apex bank had on paper, decreed seamless access; not the major economic actors for who access to forex had become a matter of life and death.
With the economy literally choking from the CBN’s stranglehold on the limited forex, every player had to turn to the market segment described as parallel market. By this I mean manufacturers, traders, parents with kids abroad, traffickers – name them – the familiar throng who couldn’t get dollars to buy. And the banks – ever the shylock – cashed in to wreak their own havoc. Meanwhile, the CBN was content to suffer the illusion of keeping a tight rein on the official forex window while in reality, the situation had actually spun out of control. The result was the naira hitting the bottom at N520 to the United States dollar in the black market for more than three weeks running. And so, while the black market prospered, the CBN pretended it was still in the business of forex management!
There are of course lessons from the development. First is the shattering of the so-called invisibility of the parallel market. True, there may not have been weeping and gnashing in the quarters of the parallel market operators as yet, it must be nonetheless comforting to see the segment taste the bitter broth they have long served the real sector as indeed the rest of us. Aminu Gwadabe, president, Association of Bureau De Change Operators of Nigeria (ABCON), puts it so well when he declared last week that the operators are in for a bad season. Just dessert? Who says the market is not beatable?
Second is the futility of decreeing genuine demands for forex out of existence. The point is –Nigerians in dire need will look for forex anywhere they can get them even if that includes digging tunnels right up to the US Federal Reserve! Had the CBN factored this into the equation as against its preference to live in its denial or wish things away, it may have evolved a more pragmatic policy.
The third is imperative of a new industrial policy. I say it for the umpteenth time, there must be a way to get our forex-dependent manufacturing concerns to generate their forex needs at least to reduce the pressure on the common pool. Where is the sense in drawing from a pool while doing nothing to replenish?
Third is to admit that there is really no magic in the business. I have long made the point on this page: much as it would want to, the CBN has little or no control over the rate of forex accretion. It is a question of managing what is available! That is the fact that is often lost on the hordes of critics who as it often appears, want to see the CBN sell what it does not have.
Now, why did the CBN have to wait till the bottom nearly dropped before swinging into action? What’s so novel about the latest review that the apex bank would have to be prodded to act? By this I mean the penultimate week’s demand by the National Economic Council for a review of the forex policy?
These questions are no doubt legitimate. However, they ignore one major factor which made the review possible. First point is to admit that the situation today is a lot different from what it was last year. The stats are not only better; they are more comforting. At $55+ per barrel for crude, oil price may not have fully recovered, there is no doubt that it is on a steady rebound. The same is no less true of crude production; with output currently put at two million barrels per day, the signs are not just of good times ahead but of steady progress being made to restore normalcy to the troubled Niger Delta. With the foreign reserves finally notching up to $30 billion, it would take more than a thousand Emefieles not to yield to the emerging pragmatism.
Will this policy be sustainable?
My honest answer? Enjoy while it last!

Dear reader, yours truly will be away on vacation for six weeks. See you in April.

February 28, 2017
Naira: Chasing the wind

Eight months into Godwin Emefiele’s ‘’Managed Float Exchange Rate System” – the verdict, at least so it appears, is that all is far from being well. If anything, things have gone much worse, not better, with the forex policy introduced in June last year.

As predicted (or prophesied?), the naira has finally crossed the N500 line to the United States dollar; indeed, in the last two weeks, it has oscillated between N506 to N516. And so, the debate on whether the system can claim to have served the country well in the last eight months has ceased to be academic: it is the reality we now live with.

Little wonder, the governors at the National Economic Council, (NEC) on Thursday last week demanded an immediate review of the policy by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). What they had in mind, they wouldn’t say. Be that as it may, the surprise is that it took them eight months to come to that conclusion.

Talk about the CBN being on the spot, weeks before, the cyber-sphere had been awash with all manners of theories – ranging from the outlandish to the harebrained –alleging serious economic crimes against the monetary authorities. Part of the frenzy of finding who to blame for the naira’s one-way trip to the Golgotha was to cast the Central Bank of Nigeria governor, Godwin Emefiele, in the lead of Project Kill the Naira! And as if determined to pour fuel into the raging inferno, Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami (SAN), reportedly issued the apex bank governor a query ostensibly to explain the charges – which I consider too base to list here – charges that may well have been dredged up from the vacuous rumour mill!

Of course, these are interesting times. Soon enough, there would be enough blames to go round for everyone.

For now, where do we go from here? From managed to the floating exchange rate regime, what next? We have turned full cycle. The former, despised for its rigidity – never mind that we had some semblance of stability – was blamed for sundry ills plaguing the economy. The latter, for all its pretences to the allocative power of the market has been a disaster (if it worked, we probably would not be talking of landing in the cesspit of recession).

Trust the manufacturer who could not access forex; the parent who could not remit wards’ fees to the college in a foreign university, the sundry importer whose 41-odd items were declared ineligible for official forex by Emefiele’s CBN, there is no telling the difference between the old and the new. Not even a good word from our hordes of analysts for whom the thriving black market is sufficient proof of the blind alley that the two policies have left us! Eight months on, we may have just realised how badly the Nigerian ailment has been misdiagnosed.

Here is what I wrote eight months ago when I first observed our obsession with forex management. The quest, I had reasoned, “stems from a fundamental misdiagnosis of the problem”. The problem, I had argued, being “more fundamental, touches on the ability of the economy to renew itself… the problem comes down to the tragedy of a nation that relies on a single commodity for all its forex; one that spends a disproportionate chunk of its forex on imports”.

Needless to state that I have been proven right. Few weeks later I had also warned on this page: “Had the economy’s minders spent as much time on how to get the economy on its feet as they have done on figuring out the arithmetic of sharing the shrinking piggy bank, we would probably be well on the way to developing the concrete policies to get some our critical industries revving back to life and to boost our forex stock”.

Today, we seem set for the same old prescriptions that brought us here in the first place. Never mind that the CBN has shouted itself hoarse; it appears that nobody is listening. The problem, says the apex bank, is that it does not have enough forex to go round! Unfortunately, unlike the naira which it has the liberty to print, the dollar is a no-go area.

Yet, we expect the naira to rebound by throwing it to the market hounds. And while we can do nothing about increasing the stock of forex in the piggy bank, we are also not prepared to give up our love for those exotic items that consume a huge chunk of our forex! And while Emefiele fails to play the magician, we demand that his head be served on the platter!

Just imagine the club of whiners. As it was in the very beginning, so it is even now: manufacturers, traders, contractors, portfolio investors to shady operators; name them; all them permanently on queue for forex. The range of demands is such that makes it tempting to assume that dollar has suddenly become the local medium of exchange. How could anyone not have foreseen the current unidirectional move of the naira more so at a time the supply of forex had severely contracted?

Merely by the amount of pressure brought to bear on Emefiele’s CBN in the last few days, expect to see some hastily packaged policies to ameliorate what is essentially a structural problem – something that requires deep thought as against superficial obsession with forex management.

But then, that is the way of a people that would rather treat symptoms than tackle the disease.

Finally, I need to highlight another fundamental problem that the minders of the economy continue to ignore. Today, Nigerians worry that segment of that so-called parallel market has grown wings to the extent that it now plays the reference rate while the official inter-bank rate acts the adjunct. The question is: what are the monetary authorities doing about it? We are talking here of the club of unscrupulous actors known not only to prey on the system but have since become an atavistic force. What would it require to take them on? Why does the federal government prefer to feign helplessness in the face of their brutal assault on the nation’s currency? And where in the world, save Nigeria, are foreign currencies hawked on the highways as you would ‘pure water’?

What is the role of the Bureau de Change in the equation? By rule, they are supposed to serve the lower end of the market. Do they? Given that the latter operate strictly by its own opaque codes, what is the chance in a million that the CBN will ever be able to bring this segment within the loop of its forex management?

Is anyone still talking about respite for the naira?

February 21, 2017
No tears for Arik Air

With the take-over of Arik Air by Asset Management Corporation (AMCON) on Thursday last week, there must be legions out there ready to swear that the airline’s cup was not only full but running over. Indeed, only those extremely unfamiliar with the creeping regulatory, operational and commercial issues that the airline had to square up to in the last quarter of 2016 in particular could have missed the whiff of a somewhat inevitable regulatory action.
Was Arik guilty as charged? The statement by the undertakers –AMCON leaves no one in doubt about their believe that Arik deserves to roast in the furnace: “For some time now, the airline, which carries about 55% of the load in the country, has been going through difficult times that are attributable to its bad corporate governance, erratic operational challenges, inability to pay staff salaries and heavy debt burden among other issues, which led to the call for authorities in the country to intervene before Arik goes under like many before it”.
It didn’t end there: “The move, which clearly underscores government’s decision to instill sanity in the nation’s aviation sector has also prevented a major catastrophe that would among other factors protect, and preserve Arik Airlines as a going concern. The development will afford Arik Airlines, which is the largest local carrier to go back to regular and undisrupted operations, avoid job losses, protect investors and stakeholder funds as well as ensure safety and stability in the already challenged aviation sector. The airline would now be managed by Capt. Roy Ukpebo Ilegbodu, a veteran aviation expert under the receivership of Mr. Oluseye Opasanya, SAN.”
Let’s look a bit more closely at the particulars. December 20, last year, the workers went on strike over unpaid wages, non-unionization and non-remittance of pensions and other statutory deductions. To end the picketing, the regulator, NCAA had to be called in. In a communiqué later signed by representatives of Arik Air, the aviation industry unions – NAAPE, ATSSSAN and NUATE, and NCAA, the airline agreed to pay the outstanding wages in addition to addressing all of the issues that led to the strike including a review of the circumstances of all laid-off employees. True to its culture of impunity, it reneged.
Before then, the airline had been locked in tango over non-carriage of passengers’ baggage and other sundry infractions of regulations involving its London to Lagos flights between December 2 and December 4, 2016. Again, NCAA was forced to slam a hefty sanction of N6 million (a separate compensation of $150 was to be paid to each of its passengers whose baggage was delayed) on December 22. Now, if these events were to be one-off, one would have nursed the hope that the airline would at some point put its acts together by showing some modest improvement. However, rather than address the problems, the airline appeared to have slipped further down the operational abyss the consequence of which was the siege by customers on its counters across the federation over poor customer services in January this year.
In the circumstance of the symptoms appearing more like those of a terminally diseased enterprise, the rather drastic pill by AMCON would seem appropriate.
But then, a more sympathetic look would reveal an airline deserving of more understanding, if not support. I have often wondered how a local airline like Arik can ever imagine that they have a chance in an environment of fierce competition and nary government support. Imagine an airline whose ticket sales are in naira forced to undertake a disproportionate amount of its operations – from basic spares to C and D checks all in foreign currencies; and this when access to forex is not only prohibitive but expensive, and where loans are in double digits. This is where those making a song of corporate governance are yet to tell us, how, like the Avatar of the Christian faith, they expect the board and management of Arik air to turn water to Jet A1!
What do I find wrong with the takeover? Nothing, except that the advertised intention is often time a far cry from the real thing. Casting the proverbial first stone is only AMCON’s first step in the feast of sleaze. You can bet on the corporation releasing mind-boggling corporate infractions in the coming days as Nigerians get set to come to terms with what is potentially controversial corporate takeover of all time.
For now, the N300 billion hole, said to be in the books of banks alleged by AMCON will probably do. Oh yes, that if true, would no doubt take a sector already certified ailing further down the pit. But then, that is AMCON’s words against Arik’s. As for governance issues highlighted by AMCON justifying the takeover, that aside being hardly new, is the same plague suffered by our corporates – public and private – including no less an entity such as AMCON whose record of sale of assets has remained as opaque as the purveyors of the toxic assets!
And the wages palaver? Aren’t all – from state government to some departments of the federal government – sinners who have come short in the courts of the Nigerian worker?
Would the new managers perform magic? Only if they have an untrammeled access to Emefiele’s vaults in the Central Bank of Nigeria. For Hadi Sirika, the aviation minister, it is probably another job in a day after the fiasco of closing down Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja for routine maintenance.
Again, you ask – what do I find irksome about the take-over? Simple: first is the astounding barefaced impunity of the Nigerian corporate elite in their clinical execution of corporate heist; the second is that the exercise is not meant to solve anything. More worrisome however is the growing charge that the exercise is somewhat ethnic-driven. I hope I am wrong on the latter.
Perhaps I need to be more pointed here: Arik Air, in succumbing fatally to the Nigerian atrophy, may be guilty as hell; the point is – are the scavengers now looming over the carcass of the once promising airline any better? Have the same sharks revived Aero Contractors years after taking over?
How bizarre can things get? Imagine an Ado Sanusi, who until Wednesday last week was the Deputy Managing Director of Arik Air now suddenly catapulted into Aero Contractors Airline as Managing Director? The individual, who only 24 hours before had announced the intention of Arik to challenge the take-over! As reward for good services rendered to who and to what end?
Far for shedding a tear for Arumeni Ikhide, the erstwhile chairman of Arik Air, my tears would rather go to the luckless country being raped in such broad daylight.

February 14, 2017
2Face: Why they rage

“Dear Nigerians, after due consultations, it has become clear that the #OneVoiceNigeria protest scheduled to hold in Lagos and Abuja on Monday the 6th of February is under serious threat of hijack by interests not aligned with our ideals. The point I am intent on making is that is (sic) not worth the life of any Nigerian. It is in fact motivated by the need to negotiate a better deal for the ordinary Nigerian. I therefore announce the cancellation of the planned protest. We would share further information in due course. We appreciate the massive support. I am convinced that our voices have been heard… ”

That was Innocent Tuface Idibia, in a short video to announce the cancellation of his highly publicised march on Saturday night. Yours truly obviously saw it coming. It takes an appreciation of the massive psychological operation (psych-ops) deployed against the leading light of the march in the past week alone to see why the event stood to chance of being held. Indeed, it is a miracle that the man still had the presence of mind to prepare what is evidently a hastily prepared visual to the public.

As for the trophy for the abortion of the legitimate protest, that deservedly goes to Fatai Owoseni – the Lagos top cop who insisted that the constitution and the law counted for little when it comes to his idea of law and order. To him, what the constitution and the law guarantee are only as far as the old discredited colonial-style law enforcement template would allow.

To him, it was sufficient that no official request came from the protesters notifying security agencies of their plan; moreover, he would add that intelligence report indicated that criminals might hijack the process to foment trouble. And so in Owoseni’s book, individuals or group of persons who may wish to embark on civil demonstration should inform the police until adequate security can be arranged for them!

To imagine that this is the individual in charge of policing the home of dissent – the acclaimed Centre of Excellence, a fast transforming mega-city; not only does it leave little imagination about his suitability for the challenge but raises serious questions about his understanding of role of the police institution in a modern, democratic state!

Should one also talk of the chief law officer of the federation who would rather be missing in action where contestations about issues of law and justice crop up? What about the Pontius Pilate presidency that would go on to speak from both sides of the mouth at a time the rights of citizens are being trampled under?

I perfectly understand the pains of the Buharists for whom the Tuface capitulation merely presented ample occasion to gloat, and settle scores: “A man who did not protest against music Piracy that is affecting his business and did not protest against the massive corruption in his home state did not look to me as a man will balls to lead any other form of protest. He was given the go ahead by the Vice President and the Police but you can’t protest over nothing.”

That was the message of Anasieze Donatus, in an interview with Premium Times. Tayo Ayano, speaking to the same medium was just as blunt: “Tuface should start from his wife’s state, Akwa Ibom where the ‘uncommon governor’ practically stole his people blind and then move to Delta State where they celebrate thieves and common criminals.”

To those who insist on Tuface being an unlikely saint and so stand disqualified on the roll of those that could cast the proverbial stone, I would argue that he never sought to cast himself in that role. To the best of my knowledge, what he sought to do was merely galvanise like minds to engage the government on the raging issues of the day; the very issues that define our existence such as being echoed in bars and street corners.

These are the untamed cost of living that have left most households pauperised; the collapse of industries, of the national currency; the unprecedented below par performance of Buhari’s ministers in the face of the dire emergency, the continuing meltdown in state institutions and the apparent lack of direction all of which have bred despair in the polity.

The problem, it appears, is that a high flier has chosen to lead the charge in seeking to articulate the very issues that agitate Nigerians daily.

In aborting the protests, the federal government may have spared itself the embarrassing spectacle of watching the hordes of angry, frustrated Nigerians rant to no end about its supreme incompetence before a global audience in the age of the new media; that no way diminishes the tragedy of that botched outing nor the weight of their undelivered message.

However, let’s even assume that the government is able to put down the resurgent culture of civil protests – which seems increasing doubtful in the age of the new media – what about the problems of governance created by its own inertia that is at the heart of the distrust and ill-will? Would these also be decreed out of existence?

Now that the messenger is at least temporarily out of the way, the question is – what becomes of the message? Put it another way: why do the people rage? Why the anger?

The answer is not hard to hazard: not in our recent history have we seen an administration utterly lacking both in direction and cohesion. But then, that itself is an understatement. How do you describe a government which after bungling the budgetary process shops for alibis? A government that has made such a mess of its Mid-Term Expenditure Framework that the National Assembly could not but sneer at what it described as its sophomoric effort? Imagine an administration laying a $30 billion loan request before parliament with no specific projects attached to the request? How bad can things get? And considering how bad things are, where is the sense of emergency?

Think of members of the nation’s Economic Management Team – the monetary and fiscal monetary authorities –working at cross purposes with each other. Only in Nigeria can this be contemplated –at a time of dire emergency!

Where are the strategies to get our industries revving back to life? Where are the strategic plans to wean our industries off their dependence on imported raw materials and hence foreign exchange in the medium term? In short, where are the clear-sighted, forward-looking strategies to get the nation out of the current challenges other than the same old, tired ideas that brought us to this point?

Left to pick between #IstandwithBuhari and #IstandwithNigeria, the choice should be obvious.

February 7, 2017
When the state is on AWOL

Until last week, few Nigerians outside the mainstream Pentecostal Christian establishment could claim to have heard of Apostle Suleiman Johnson let alone his Auchi, Edo State -based Omega Fire Ministries Worldwide. Not anymore. Give it to infinite capacity of the nation’s security establishment to mismanage any cause no matter how worthy or well-intentioned, the man has suddenly become an issue – and now hero of sorts to some people – no thanks to last week’s bungled arrest by the Department of State Security Service (DSS). AS it is, what should ordinarily have been a routine invitation extended to a citizen to clarify an alleged felony has suddenly become a big issue now tearing at the nation’s socio-political fabric.
For aside the new low which the embarrassing episode represents for an agency that ordinarily prides itself as the bastion of ruthless efficiency; the rumble it has generated has, to the extent that it has drawn the service into the vortex of the ethno-religious maelstrom currently rocking the foundations of the country, has suddenly thrust it into the centre of the raging inferno.
It is of course the Ekiti Governor, Ayodele Fayose that we must thank not just for daring (yet again) to strip the service of the aura underlying its assumed invincibility but going as far as revealing its majestic impotence like his PDP-brother governor Nyesom Wike did on October 8 last year when he spectacularly fobbed off officials of the Department of State Security when the latter staged a mid-night raid on the residence of Justice Abdullahi Liman of the Federal High Court, Port Harcourt. For while the gubernatorial delinquencies exhibited in the two instances, which although represent a clear affront to the rule of law and the very notion of orderly society has remained unchallenged, it is the continuing emergence of the mutant forms of the same disease that amplifies the problem of a state in free, unarrested, fall.
By now, most Nigerians must have either watched or heard about the Johnson Suleiman video. Needless to state that the seduction to mindless murder is galling as it is offensive to my Christian sensibilities just as it is antithetical to everything that the faith stands for. Never mind the latter-day rationalisations by official of the church which are no more than futile attempts to smoothen the edges of the open and undisguised incitement to felony. What must be alarming to the rational mind is the open license to murder as well as the opportunistic exploitation of the carnage in Southern Kaduna to further stoke embers of violence by a presumably influential cleric.
In the circumstance, the invitation of the cleric by the DSS is certainly justifiable; not so however is the mid-night siege on his hotel room in the Ekiti State capital and the accompanying drama. Indeed, while the Suleiman episode and the brouhaha it has generated merely evinces the tragedy of the state in mortal decline; a state where influential actors seek exceptions from the rules governing the collective, the specious rationalisation by those insisting on making a non-existent distinction between what they consider in the particular instance as the lesser crime of incitement to murder and the actual crime is not only unhelpful but disingenuous.
Isn’t that the reason different provisions and hence punishments exist for different grades of crime?
But then, that is only one half of the picture of the duplicitous state– now best exemplifies in the Southern Kaduna mayhem. For a federal government that has been pathetic in its response to the carnage just as the security agencies have fallen miserably short in confronting the real daemons, the Suleiman episode merely presents a good alibi for inaction. Suleiman therefore, could well be guilty as charged for what is at best a crime of indiscretion – although he is most probably, no more guilty than a certain Nasir el-Rufai who is on record to have handed hefty cash payments to some Fulani herdsmen in appeasement to stop their murderous activities.
Has the DSS requested el-Rufai’s cooperation in identifying the fellows who received the largesse from him? How does one explain why a DSS which continues to live in denial – suddenly elevating the more minor issues like those of Suleiman over and above the weightier issues of murder and mayhem allegedly being daily perpetrated by the bloodthirsty Fulani herdsmen under the very noses of the intelligence community? Is it that the perpetrators are not only invisible but invincible?
By the way, does anyone still remember Saleh Bayeri, the Interim National Secretary of Gan Allah Fulani Association who sensationally told Premium Times that the Agatu bloody conflict of February 2016 was a reprisal attack by his people against the Agatus who he accused of killing, in 2013, a prominent Fulani man – Ardo Madaki? Here are his exact words as reported by Premium Times in March 2016: “This action (the death of Ardo Madaki – that is) reverberated across all Fulani people in the whole of West Africa and the clamour for revenge began to grow strong. He comes from a very well respected clan and the Agatu sent the Fulani a chilling message with his murder”.
By the way, the Agatu, he claimed, also killed over 300 of his people “but because we don’t have people in government or the media, no one said anything when genocide was being carried out against our people”.
Really?
Does this justify the revenge – the sacking of an entire community and this in a modern state with all the apparatus of law enforcement? Talk about an admission of crime and the motive; would the whiff of crime, even of a mere accessory to mass murder, pass for a lesser crime in the circumstance in which the Agatu massacres took place? Did the DSS ever take Bayeri in for questioning in the face of the grave admission? So why would the supporters of Suleiman not ask for similar exemption?
All of these are of course possible in a state in retreat – a state that has long surrendered the monopoly of arms to a rampaging militia of herdsmen; one that has equally lost its rationale as the guarantor of justice and public order. It is sadly a case of – what you see is what you get! In other words, Messrs Suleiman and Bayeri are merely the obverse sides of the same coin of Acquired Impunity Disorder Syndrome (AIDS) of a wilting state.
Expect more huffing and puffing in the coming days – until another excitable topic breaks – to herald another cycle of talk.

January 31, 2017
Osinbajo: From Davos with love

To the legion that has been unrelenting in their clamour for a coherent economic policy, the federal government, it appears, seems finally set to give them something to chew upon. A newly-developed Economic Recovery Growth Plan designed to take the country out of recession, says Vice President Yemi Osinbajo at a Business Interaction Group on Nigeria attended by foreign investors in Davos, Switzerland last week, is in the offing.
While the details of the plan will have to wait till its launch date in February, of interest is that the Vice President, perhaps following in the tradition of his boss – President Muhammadu Buhari, seems to prefer a so-called high profile international forum to let Nigerians into its plans to address what is essentially a structural domestic economic challenge. Again, while I have no problem with the high-octane affair and the photo-op that Davos presented to our officials, it seems easy to discern an effort which, in playing up to the tradition of a leadership obsessed with Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and its hordes of portfolio investors, typically lapses into the usual cant at a time the world has learnt to see and treat us as a joke!
So what is the problem with the Economic Recovery Growth Plan (EGRP)? First is the fact that the plan is coming 20 months late. Never mind the implicit admission of lack of a holistic working plan by the Buhari administration, its coming at this time would appear to have finally validated the claim of the administration’s critics that it lacked a blueprint to tackle the challenges facing the economy.
Second is the content of the plan. Admittedly, we can only speculate at this stage. Nonetheless, it is interesting to hear Vice President Osinbajo speak of the administration’s modest efforts at redirecting the national budget in favour of capital spend. As against previous years when capital estimates hovered around 16 percent, the administration has quite admirably been able to push capital expenditure (capex) to 30 percent – if you call that an achievement in a country with unprecedented infrastructural gap. Imagine that under the 30-year roadmap infrastructure development plan – the Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIIMP), it is said that Nigeria would require at least $2 trillion (N398.1 trillion) over the course of the next three decades. Again, the vice-president spoke of federal government’s plans to utilise the nation’s pension funds to finance infrastructure in the country, the Social Investment Programme under which N500bn has again been proposed for this year in addition to last year’s. These planned infrastructure spend, will no doubt, go a long way to reflate the economy and also in unlock the nation’s socio-economic potentials.
But then, what we need now are bold and if you may – radical thinking out of the current morass. Not the old, worn ideas for an economy in trauma.
In other words, while the above measures may prove helpful somewhat, they may just end up as placebos for the simple reason of the many plagues being inflicted on the economy by a cartel of disparate, unpatriotic actors whose business consists essentially in manipulating everything from its institutions to the national currency for their selfish reasons.
Elsewhere, I have written about predatory behaviours of financial sector operatives. What else is there to say of the usurious class known to reap where they have not sown? What about their spectacular preference for questionable financial derivatives that are no more than Ponzi schemes and other unconscionable activities that render them as laws unto themselves?
Today, I wish to take on their allies – the players in the forex market – for the obvious reason of being such a pain in the nation’s ass! Of course you know the story: the naira, our currency, is currently worth a little more than tissue paper! On Friday, a unit of the greenback reportedly sold for N490! That is supposed to be the market-determined rate being pushed by agents of foreign capitals in our midst!
Of course, I understand that the scarcity of forex occasioned by the dip in global oil prices at a time of uncurbed demand would translate to the pressure on the naira. At a time everything – from fuel, consumables spares and raw materials – are imported, this would ordinarily seem inevitable. What we do know however is that the current run on the national currency is sustained by a cartel of rogue players in the official segment of the forex market in alliance with the shadowy players in the parallel market. The problem is that while their destructive activities on the economy have long been established, very little is being done by the federal government to take them on.
I ask: what will it take to wrest the country from the firm grip of these manipulators? Is any thinking going on in this regard?
Now to the perennially weeping club – the nation’s club of manufacturers. While I do not mean to be uncharitable, I have often wondered if truly the country has a manufacturing class to boast of. As it appears, what we have is a bunch of players permanently hung on forex. Never mind that some of the so-called established manufacturing companies have operated here for decades, the truth is that they do not earn, talk less of covering their forex needs from their operations. Imagine for instance, that to produce margarine, we are still being told that the companies would require forex to bring in palm oil from Malaysia! None, it appears, have found sense in backward integration nor shown willingness to explore its assumed benefits. Of course, so long as oil flowed, there will be enough forex to go round! Now, it seems the party is over!
I once raised the issue of a petrochemical complex which I considered as central to a future industrial strategy. Again, has anyone in government yet figured its place in the industrial mix?
Talk about our industrial policies needing a rethink. Would Osinbajo’s ERGP fix the lacuna?
The greatest culprit of course is the prodigal federal government that spends 40 percent of its entire forex (something it cannot afford) to import fuel that it can refine locally. And now we are told by Vice President Osinbajo that we have to wait for Dangote to bail us out in 2019! For now, we can forget about pushing more aggressively for more refineries to come on board; fixing the ailing ones to augment the supply situation or even the much-hyped colocation of refineries. Who says better attention to those issues would not guarantee speedier recovery? Why are we so unblest?

January 24, 2017