The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has lamented that President Muhammadu Buhari’s Friday Independence Day speech failed to address Nigeria’s economic challenges, thus falling expectations of the citizenry.
The Lead Director, CSJ, Eze Onyekpere, said on Friday in Abuja that Nigerians expect their leader to proposes a vision which is a new way of doing things to achieve targeted results.
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“As the Nigerian economy continues to struggle and citizens remain traumatized by hardship, a leader must be able to motivate citizens to confront the economic, existential and nation building challenges. Nigeria is in dire need of a motivational and an inspirational leader who leads from the front and through the sheer power of example,” Onyekpere said.
He said, “Nigeria’s economy is ravaged by double digit inflation, worsening poverty, incredible unemployment figures especially among the youth, a fast depreciated and depreciating currency, a huge trade deficit, debt service that gulps all retained revenue, among others.
“All these are compounded by insecurity and terrorism. Nigeria’s economy has stagnated, growing at less than 1% cumulatively during the past six years, far below population growth of 2.6%.”
He said that though COVID-19 has battered economies everywhere, but Nigeria’s economic malaise predates the pandemic as Nigeria had slumped into a recession immediately the President took office, thus, the pandemic merely added to the economic woes.
He said that the CSJ expected that policy measures to control the economic rot would have been announced by the President.
He said that it is regrettable that there were no policy statements to stop the free fall of the naira which has lost 13 percent of its value since July 28 2021 after the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) stopped sales of the foreign currencies to Bureau de Change.
He lamented that today, the naira exchanges for N570 to $1 on the dominant market where the majority of Nigerians source their funds while it is largely unchanged at the average rate of 411 naira to dollar at the controlled CBN window which is available to only a few privileged Nigerians.
He therefore, urged President Buhari to urgently come up with policies and reforms to reduce insecurity so that businesses and farming can start to thrive; reduce inflation, protect the poor and vulnerable and support economic recovery.
He said, “Accomplishing these will require a big push in exchange-rate management, monetary policy, trade policy, fiscal policy and social protection. There should be increasing the transparency and predictability of exchange rate management policies to reduce distortions in allocations in the private and public sector; and to ensure that agents can access foreign exchange in a timely and orderly manner, at an agreed rate.”
He also called for full elimination of the petrol subsidy while refocusing subsidy (if need be) on production instead of consumption and to also reduce the cost of governance across boards.
