The naira is what 95% of Nigerians need to carry out their daily shores including putting food on their table and sending their children to school. Unfortunately, parasites waging war against our naira, their collaborating crooks in government and in the media and our foreign detractors often make us feel that without the almighty dollar which without any objective criteria they claim today exchanges for N1,000 to $1, Nigeria is doomed. But in truth, the naira in terms of its purchasing power is in high demand by our toiling but short-changed farmers in Nigerian rural communities in spite of the hysteria of parasites in the urban centres.
It is on record that our naira, until a coordinated assault by crooks, parasites and their foreign sponsors, competed favourably with both the dollar and British pound sterling. I remember when I travelled to London for three weeks’ vacation as a young employee of the Guardian in 1983, my Personal Travel Allowance (PTA) was N500. But the real story was that when I finished spending the value of my travellers’ cheque, I went to Liverpool Street where those Indian traders accepted naira without any hesitation.
Assault on naira started in 1986 with Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) which sounded the death-knell of our budding industries, the backbone of our naira. Olu Falae and Kalu Idika Kalu and other agents of our creditors who claimed there was no alternative to Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) spoke of ‘inevitable large scale programme of devaluation’ despite warning by professors Ricardo Fari of John Hopkins University and Sam Aluko of the University of Ife who insisted there was alternative to even death which he said was life.
In November 13, 1986, the first-tier rate put the exchange rate at N2.80 to $1. By November 13, it has depreciated to N3.45 to $1 and by November 1990, it was N10.75 to $1. By July 1991 it was N11.32 to $1 forcing Augustus Aikhomu, Babangida’s military vice president to warn the CBN that “the value of the naira cannot be left absolutely to the whims and caprices of market forces”.
Babangida went on to institutionalise corruption through the foreign exchange policies that allowed military men and their fronts to amass so much wealth with which they embarked on a wholesale importation of the labour of other societies.
The parasites adopting Obasanjo, as their arrow head, took over power in 1999. With their privatization programme which according to a National Assembly probe, was nothing but a ploy to sell to themselves Nigeria’s total investment of about $100b for a paltry $1.5b, it was obvious, his administration merely continued the war against the naira from where Babangida stopped.
The assault on the naira continued under Jonathan with his administration’s extension of tax waivers to parasitic car importers. Our leaders continued to play the ostrich even as Michelin, Dunlop and some pharmaceutical firms relocated, ostensibly because of poor power supply to Ghana which ironically depends on Nigeria for her energy needs. We all played the ostrich pretending not to know that their relocation was due to uncontrolled importation of substandard tyres from China and expired tyres from Europe by dangerous and desperate parasites with the help of crooks in government.
But no one puts this better than Audu Ogbe, former Minister of Agriculture in a speech he gave back in 2018 titled ‘the problem of importation’ where he concluded that “a ship load of rice translates to a ship load of unemployment.”
According to him “the tragedy of Nigeria began with SAP in 1986 when we became importers of everything including milk, sugar, pencil, handkerchief and champagne, consumed more by Nigerian than any nation on planet earth according to Jacques Champagne de Labriolle, the French ambassador to Nigeria; and toothpaste and tomato paste which cost Nigeria $18m and $400m respectively annually.”
Hitting the nail on its head, he had submitted that “someone is making sure you fail when you want to produce at home. These are people who can kill if they have a chance… these guys have seized this country’s economy; they have taken us a hostage and have no intention of giving up because this is a huge market… and they have taken control”.
He did not forget to call attention of Nigerians to the unpatriotic role of (some crooks in the media), working for their principals, who with their publications try to demoralize Nigeria local farmers in the case of rice local production. For him: “To cure Nigeria malady will take a while and will take a strong government”.
He was right. Both late Obafemi Awolowo and Dora Akunyuli had the foretaste of how vicious these desperate groups could be. The former, for saying he would stop importation of second hand clothes if he won the 1959 election, had his helicopter stoned in Onitsha while the latter had a close shave with death when her car was sprayed with bullets in Onitsha because of her war against importation of substandard and fake drugs into the country.
But Tinubu who has said we should not sympathise with him has his job well cut out. He already has the answer to the question of contribution of importers of the labour of other societies to our economy in our army of unemployed youths in Nigeria and thousands of others that have migrated to Britain and Canada where many of them do menial jobs.
As to the source of the parasites’ foreign exchange, he like other Nigerians already know it is CBN which was converted into an ATM without a password under President Jonathan and Emefiele. It only got worse under Buhari and Emefiele.
We also now know that some of those who secured CBN foreign exchange allocation for importation of raw materials often end up using such to import substandard products with the active support of crooks in government and cover up by crooks in the media.
If you are in doubt, ask yourself how the prime suspect in the case of banned imported crusader medicated soap and Mekado soap which (contained mercury which can damage skin, eyes, ears, brain, kidney and the nervous system”) with a street value of N1b who according to Professor Adeyeye, NAFDAC boss, has not produced a bar of the soap in Nigeria since 2013, secured foreign exchange to import the soap seven times in 2021 alone with each consignment not less than three containers?(Guardian Sept 16, 2023).
The battle to protect our naira must start with starving of parasitic importers of labour of other societies of foreign exchange. The president must also devise a means of protecting our local industries.
Our own Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala the WTO chair, during a recent chat with CNN’s Richard Quest pointed out that that both the US and China, the world biggest economies have accused each other of protectionism. The truth is that the West that claims we are all equal in a globalised world subsidizes each head of cow owned by those in animal husbandry industry by $2 dollars. And going by World Bank claim that 70% of Africans live below two dollars a day, that would mean the life of a cow in the West is worth much more than that of a man in Africa.
Our rural farmers that need the naira most can also be empowered by state governments buying off their farm produce just as government of rice-producing states in Asia do before exporting same to Nigeria several years later. Some of the savings made by withholding foreign exchange from parasites that bring only misery to Nigerian youths can be used to help the states set up cottage industries.