The travails of the Naira since the last ten months could be considered as the most worrisome economic miasma in the country since the last over eight years. Many would argue that it is unemployment while many more will insist that it is food inflation that bother Nigerians more.
Because the Cardoso’s CBN has chosen the Naira as area of prime attention which, when solved would patently allow the rest of the inadequacies in the economy to fall in line. This looks more believable due to the simple fact that everything about a country that does not have a competitive capacity in the international market suffers the foreign exchange pandemic. Nigeria has failed to optimise her capacity as a nation rich in natural resources and has fallen into the same revenue bracket with Sudan and Somalia. No matter how huge her oil flows, it is still not enough to provide the about N20 Trillion needed annually to run the country and clear the backlog of debts that have been hanging on for the last many years. So many are aware of these, including our many economists, quasi economists and illiterate politicians. Even the rustic group of the so-called team that built Lagos are aware and have been applying all they know and the ones they got from the grapevine . They have really continued running from wall to wall in search of pyrrhic results which they know could not be the solution only to be seen to be doing something. But the fact remains that Cardoso has become a victim of circumstance and must continue to blow hot and cold in search of the true pace of the Naira. But bankers are given to magic. He was part of the magicians that built Citizens Bank until the heat became unbearable and they could no longer apply raw talents to drive the Naira as they are doing now.
Some few weeks back Nigerians , especially those who believe in magic, went agog with the measured improvement in the forex market, attributing it to the share wizardry of the President and his Lagos boys. Those who rule by figures and data, especially at this time of artificial intelligence (AI) refused to bulge, insisting that they have not seen any enduring action or policy that aligns with the causes and effects of the Naira predicament . They, therefore, insisted that it is a matter of time the forex rate went back to its prevailing position occasioned by the endemic circumstances.
Many Nigerians have taken advantage of the short period of luck to solve a rather precarious forex difficulty and this has conferred on them the high spirit of hailing the economic planners, especially the CBN governor for waving a magic wand.
Today, there is a gradual return to status quo ante which many of us won’t like, as costs of such activities like flight for local and international trips that had fallen from the high heavens may now roll back. It makes one remember a government health policy code-named “Roll-Back Malaria” , which deals with malaria scourge while the programme lasted only for the scourge to come with more power few days after. The current activities to tame the exchange rate look more like prescribing panadol for malaria because pain was involved. Small knowledge of economics tells us that whatever we are doing now @is artificial and we must be told this so that Nigerians must know that we would be here for long 6and must get ready for some unknown. Let us not be receiving treatments meant to be palliative as if they are comprehensively curative.
All eyes are on the forex market and that is why Cardoso has made about six regulations on it just within the last three weeks in anticipation that ” if is does not go, was will go”, a classical manual approach to a digital challenge.
Any time I am glued to the market tables to factor the trend of the Naira for the next 24 hours, all I see is ?something akin to the wishy-washy applications applied during the Structural Adjustment periods of the early 1990s that drove the money market around all the FEM applications of Chu Okongwu and his group. That was even understandable because it propounded certain rules that reduced forex applications through the bidding process.
This time around, can Cardoso come up with anything new? The BDC trials must have been over since it is controlled by centrifugal forces outside the market? Can the CBN do something new? Nigerians are tired of this panadol approach.
Cardoso, please do something, and quickly too!!
