Market News

BY  Tony Marinho 

Perhaps the security forces would prefer not to announce operations ahead of time as it affords the enemy the opportunity to escape or ambush our gallant forces. Secrecy and silence were paramount in security. Maybe the announcement is a cunning military strategy?         

The CBN team must put a notice in CBN offices asking ‘WHAT IS THE EXCHANGE RATE OF THE NIGERIAN, NOT JUST THE NAIRA? ’. We cannot divorce the naira from the lives of Nigerians. It is a financial fatal mistake for CBN and financial institutions to ignore the Nigerian holding the naira. In medicine and education, we know that naira value determines the quality and quantity of care and education. By now, the CBN leadership would have had a rude awakening from the congratulatory media spotlight having successfully scaled the sometimes-odoriferous political screening procedure. The dream of high office is over, the nightmare of office-holding has begun, or perhaps ‘daymare’ or sleepless ‘night-and-day-mare’? One can only imagine the ‘true talk’ revelations the CBN team face daily especially with the corruption by inactivity and unconstitutional over-activity revealed by the federal government’s forensic investigator, as frightening financial facts are dug up. The team has become fully conversant with funds or the lack of funds and the ever-deepening account of the void in the vault[s] of the deeply wounded or actually raped apex bank.

The team must know the answer to the first question for the new CBN leadership: ‘Does Nigeria have $3.4billion or $34billion in Foreign Reserves?’ What is the foreign reserve figure? The CBN needs to answer ‘Who or what is the black market in Nigeria?’ The CBN should have a black-market imitator presenting the mind, method and machinations of the black market to predict the cabal’s actions to the CBN’s Daily Emergency Strategic Meeting’.

The foreign exchange black market is a major cancer in Nigeria and a very expensive debilitating disease, difficult to eradicate and very deadly to the citizenry. Everyone finally realises that everything for transporting life’s daily needs like kerosene, petrol, diesel or gas and food require foreign exchange. Manipulated or not, foreign exchange rate is very relevant to everyone, from baby on powdered milk to grandparent on imported diapers. The stupid saying that ‘good foreign exchange rates and fuel prices only favour the rich and cheat the poor’ is now exposed as the ludicrous lie we have been trying to expose for years.

Nigeria has managed to create many jobs non-existent elsewhere and refusing to create jobs that exist elsewhere – the ones which make countries great nations. We have an army of aboki forex mules, a cabal to make the dollar crazily more expensive than it should be and ‘fresh naira note sellers’ on the creation side. There is a complete lack of dedicated maintenance staff on the other hand.

Nigeria demands that the ‘Nigerian Forex Cabal’, a key culprit in our financial wows today, must, like any illegitimate organisation,  voluntarily wind-up operations by being starved of CBN funds needed by legitimate corporate and private individual needs. The cabal must be neutralised, prosecuted and imprisoned for financial terrorism against Nigeria. The CBN collaborators deserve no mercy. The cabal only thrives because someone, somewhere, created an artificial scarcity atmosphere.

CBN high officials cannot claim ignorance of the source. CBN in collaboration with other relevant agencies especially ICPC, EFCC, etc. must conduct a high-powered investigation to neutralise the kingpins and end this third force assault on Nigerian naira. Can the CBN wrestle the demon of the black-market cabal to the ground or will its corrupt shadow forever dwarf the CBN? Will more dollars fall out of the CBN net, under the radar allowing the cabal to create naira even less valuable than it is now with to crashing through the N1000:$1 ruining pension, salary and manufacturing plans? 

No doubt the increase in oil price to $92 per barrel should increase our foreign exchange earnings handsomely especially as we majorly reduce oil theft and approach the limit of legal barrels per day to recover from our 44% shortfall. Sadly, even with this anticipated increase in earnings, we have been told that the immediate past government secretly forward-sold our oil and perhaps [mis]spent the foreign exchange in advance and for an undisclosed period. If true, those who did this should be tried for financial mismanagement and abuse of office. The side effect of what should have been a celebratory high oil price $92 bringing much needed massive foreign exchange into Nigeria and the rubbish naira value concocted by the greed-driven foreign exchange cabal is the high market price of oil products.

Will government have to reintroduce subsidies or give more palliatives to reduce the escalating fuel and transport costs ruining Nigerian families?

Of course, if CBN could pay off Nigeria’s legitimate corporate and individual immediate accumulated dollar debts as it claims, create the miracle of providing enough dollars for daily legitimate markets with adequate dollars which requires better dollar inflows from oil etc., starve the leakage to the black-market cabal, eliminate the black market and deliberately strengthen the naira, then poverty figures would drop. We need made-in-Nigeria fuel, better power supply, destruction of oil smugglers, elimination of the forex cabal, and immediate ease-of-doing-business promotion of dollar earning enterprises which earn rather than burn foreign exchange. These will demonstrate that the government and CBN at last value the ‘THE EXCHANGE RATE OF NIGERIANS’.