Understanding the economics of Naira is important. I am going to try to explain that in layman's english, so that all the assumptions and theories thrown by many for or against can be fully dissected.

We need to understand whether its wise to keep "massaging" the naira through "pegging" strategies by selling the dollars at artificial value, as opposed to allowing the true value of the dollar to be reflected in the dutch auction between CBN and the banks, which would reflect the value of Naira in the economy.

Things we all need to keep in mind.

1. We print the naira for local consumption, which cost dollars to print.
2. Nobody accepts naira outside of Nigeria
3. All foreign trades are in dollars
4. We use dollars to help local businesses that depend heavily on foreign raw materials and goods and services.
5. There is no foreign exchange market, where the Naira is traded.

How do we get dollars into the economy
1. Nigerian meagre non oil exports
2. Nigerian crude oil exports (major part, hence the CBN has total power on the value)
3. Remittance (sending money to your loved ones back at home)

How is the dollar converted to Naira

1. Banks accept transfer from (remittance and business transactions) through their foreign syndicate and use it to balance their foreign transactions etc

2. Banks go to the CBN dutch auction and bid to buy the naira.

3. Banks hedge against the dollar in foreign markets by trading in the foreign market against the dollar in their accounts (which hardly happens because its a very risky strategy)

How has the Naira value been strong so far.

The central bank which plays the most part of making the dollar available for the banks have been releasing dollars to the banks at non competitive pricing, thereby not allowing the naira to move naturally based on the reserves we have left and the amount required by the banks for transaction, thereby limiting the movement of the naira by a very small percentage.

Whenever there is a shortfall in the availability of the dollars, they tap into the reserve to provide supply as opposed to allowing the short in supply to determine the auction price. Also remember that the banks pay CBN in Naira, which goes back to the vault and the CBN releases dollars to them in exchange at the rate the CBN is comfortable with.

Sanusi also printed more naira for the banks in the bailout strategies, which means, they were more Naira available in the market to buy more dollars, and the cycle continued.

The average GDP of Nigeria has not increased, we have not seen major infrastructural development to reflect the amount of money in the economy, which should be already noticed, with the influx of capital coming into the Nigerian economy from the reserves.

The question is not whether we should continue with this strategy of artificially massaging the value of the Naira. The question should be how long would this strategy be sustainable. This can be answered through answering this basic questions

1. Is our future oil production increasing?
2. Is oil price is at market high or market low?
3. Are we building infrastructure to aid export, i.e increasing our supply of the dollar to use to print more naira
4. Are we really developing significantly? If so in what sectors?
5. How long more would it take for us to dry up our reserves not only through massaging our currency value but through our yearly budgets that are going sky high,without infrastructural changes to reflect it,

The recommendation from IMF is just a proposal, the question we should ask ourselves is, is the current naira value over valued or under valued? And is the strategy sustainable.

What pisses me off is the amount of micro startup loans they could fulfill with even just one of the loans.

Imagine just one of the lowest loan at 2billion divided into 20Million, How many startups in Nigeria would that help?

We wonder why the country is so screwed up, and even then we tend to blame the government, If only if 20% of this money was invested into the country, Nigeria would be a developed country.

Well they even deleted the domains we paid and registered for last week. Just realised now that now. I have no idea was going on with them.

Err, The domains are now premium, you have to pay for them to be active. We seem to be given the login details, but most of the time their servers are either inaccessible or I cant figure my way around their panel if it is, because its slow.

tomaagy:

y cant we produce masterpieces like a african version of a standard site like facebook? anyone up to the challenge I'm willing to go d whole lenght in this oh anyone wanna join?

Can you build an infrastructure to support such model?

Are you that rich enough to finance such ventures?
a. A multi million dollar marketing budget?
b. servers?
c. a dedicated manpower?

You guys are ridiculous !!

I find it quiet amazing that you think handing the power problem from federal to state would actually solve the problem !!, isn't that literally the same system? And how exactly is a state government's participation private? I don't get it?

If the Nigerian government really wants to fix this problem, they would allow private companies to run the power grids and distributions without regulation and tax them on their income.

If Nigerians really want the power problem fix, they would demonstrate in front of Aso rock for an entire month or more like the labor unions do, when it comes to salary increase.

Weew this discussion is still on, so did you guys finalise on who are the top 100 best developers yet?

What is wrong with green? You guys are very funny with your hasty generalizations.

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A web developer is a software developer or software engineer who is specifically engaged in the development of World Wide Web applications, or distributed network applications that are run over the HTTP protocol from a web server to a web browser. ,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_developer

An individual or company that specializes in the development of Web sites. Web developers handle all programming aspects of creating a Web site ,
www.quickbrightsharp.com/info/glossary.html

A person who undertakes programming tasks for a Web site. This can include producing e-commerce applications or implementing a site search tool ,
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dammytosh:

  Good one bros, i strongly support your view. A good developer must be able to analyze a problem domain and start something from the scratch to solve the problem in that domain space.

dammytosh:

   So what makes a script customizer a Programming Guru (note the word "continously" it is not bad to edit other peoples work but u should be able to show a reasonable thing u did on your own from scratch before we can consider u as a developer at all.

You said the above didn't you?  Let me guess you write your programs using machine codes, because writing codes even in second generation languages like assembly, is still not from scratch, Writing for the machine directly, would be from scratch and would make a total sense to prove your point, that you are a supposed "GURU" and qualified
to be in the list of the 100 Best developers in Nigeria according to "LOY OKEZIE".

dammytosh:

   So what makes a script customizer a Programming Guru (note the word "continously" it is not bad to edit other peoples work but u should be able to show a reasonable thing u did on your own from scratch before we can consider u as a developer at all.

Your definition of a programming guru is very ambiguous. This is the reason why?

1. A programming guru is someone that can actually read codes, writes codes, understand written codes and be able to re-create read codes with or without any help

2. Programming guru's use libraries, engines, frameworks and tools to speed up their development cycle.

3. A good programmer in-fact would not waste time developing everything from scratch, he or she would make use of existing libraries, template engines, and even frameworks that he might or might not have created to solve a problem.

From your assertion

1. You are assuming that a programmer that  develops software using engines, frameworks and libraries is not competent.

2. You are assuming that when a developer embraces the usage of open-source scripts, he is not competent enough to re-write the code himself.

I would say this again, the criteria of choosing a programming guru should not be based on what a developer uses to achieve a goal, but rather how the programmer embraces the programming languages and how he or she uses them to provide ground breaking solutions. This means the programmer should be judged based on how he develops solutions through or without the usage of customizations, tweaks and enhancements of existing available solutions to solve the problem.

I have worked with many great developers, I have many great developers as friends, and I have friends working in software developing firms and all this group of people do use opensource scripts, libraries, frameworks and engines in their development.

Even the facebook and paypal uses opensource scripts too, try to view their javascript codes for example, you would see some part where they give credits to the actual open-source developers. They do not develop everything from scratch !!

I agree to
1. The criteria used is flawed
2. Most of the listed people aren't developers

nitation:

I will never vote for any developer who continuously work on open source project.

My View

- nitation

But when someone says something like
"I will never vote for any developer who continuously work on open source project."

Its like saying
"I would never acknowledge a graduate because he attended online classes or even because he used library books to get an A".

I learnt all I know today through the availability of opensource software, I have contributed to some opensource projects like OSCOMMERCE, PHPNUKE etc,  and I am wondering @nitation, WHY?

Do you hate opensource developers?

I am asking because I learnt all that I know today from other people's work. Maybe my acquired knowledge to you is categorized fake, but the question is why?

Hmm,
Wrong accusations, absurd claims would never triumph. Henceforth Nairahost would stop replying any threads related to its services on Nairaland.

According to our staff that went for the NIRA training for certification. All .ng domains would be de-activated by NIRA. So if you have a .ng domain, do plan ahead . My advice get a lower tld to replace it for now. Some domains are already de-activated, which means they have started de-activating domains.

NIRA would start charging for the domain names, and only accredited registrars would be able to register. Nairahost sent a staff for the accreditation, so we would be accredited.

@fibre

You know the beautiful thing about our ticket system is we have ticket numbers and there are ways for you to paste emails to actually support you claims, so it would be fair if you do so.

@deltree
When you registered your domain name you opted for an ID protection and that @privacyprotect is the protection of your whois. If you had told us and you have a proof that we did not guide you in disabling the ID protect, then please provide the proof. You are supposed to disable your ID protection and request for the transfer key within your client area.

@privaceprotect is not our email address but the registries. If you have actually emailed us about the problem and we didnt address it, then this post is warranted. If you did, kindly provide the proof

I would appreciate that every complaint are supported with proof and facts, others would judge fairly with that. Paste the support ticket received auto-respond email as a fact that you actually emailed us and we didn't reply you,

I would like to know the updates of this case, on the charges, what your bank said etc etc.

Yes, 2,200 (cost of two domains transfers), Kindly provide the GTB reference id, if you went to GTB to actually check the payments. No we would not paste our account statement in this forum. I would encourage you to follow any legal proceedings available to you, if you actually believe that we have stolen your money. This is my last post on this thread, I would not have further discussion regarding this matter.



Note: Interswitch daily payments via GTB are deposited in lump sum, the only way to check is to check the transaction date and match the records from the GTB interswitch account records on a merchant system, which we have done. Interswitch orders from the interswitch platform does not reflect that order.

smartsoft lied about going to GTB, as there is no way GTB would check the depositing of the amount from our balance. The only way to track it is from the interswitch gateway, which GTB would not do for a third party, in this case smartsoft.

1. Interswitch transaction record on GTB platform does not reflect that payment
2. GTB crediting our account does not reflect that payment
3. Nairahost is not using our local payment logs to match the invoice as sometimes payments fail, because of bad internet connection which we are aware of, and we credit accordingly.

New updates*
The interswitch log shows that you initiated the payment for invoice 4207 on Thursday Sep 11 2008 at 3:52:10PM. The invoice amount is N2200.00. The transaction id is 122114473057836 and it is for an order whose payment was not completed. Please call interswitch and tell them to check it, or the interswitch department of your bank.

This is just amazing, and I can't believe that you guys would actually believe that we would steal a customers 2400 Naira. This is rather very frustrating.

GTB says this, GTB said that, where is the proof? Nairahost has not received his money and no we wont credit his account if we have not.

Kindly use our support channels and be explicit in your request so that we can attend to you on time. Please note that we will appreciate if you use our support system to raise any issue before resulting to the use of forum.Thank you.

To all those that have issues with us, kindly use our support channels. Every hosting company on the internet one time or the other would have customers complaining about one absurd issue or the other, especially if your market share is relatively on the grid. We don't claim to be perfect, we try as much as possible to render our promised service and provide support as needed.

@smartsoft
Once again, if and when interswitch credits our account, the status of your invoice would change. As we have said, you should complain to your bank about the issue, we cannot complain on your behalf, Starting a thread on the issue on nairaland, would not solve the issue.

I hope one day you would understand that we cannot provide services when we have not received the money, as we have to pay bills too.

To Nairaland members that contributed with constructive responses about the issue. Thank you

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point that a druken man is happier than a sober one, George Bernard Shaw.