₦airaland Forum

NgeneUkwenu:
The man is incompetent, I tell you! As an economist myself, I know what I am saying!

989900:
It's tiring when apparently 'half-witted' fellas comment on things they know next to nothing about.

ECOTERRORS:
I think you wanted to say Home economics not Economics which u studied

NgeneUkwenu:
The man is incompetent, I tell you! As an economist myself, I know what I am saying!

barcanista:
Rather than praising the CBN Gov the OP was abusing the man without making a drop of sense. Nigerians that understand how stuffs work know that the ban by emefiele is a very good one and will encourage local production. How can Nigeria continue to use her depleting reserve on goods like toothpick and luxury like private jet? The president should backup the action of the CBN with a policÝ ban on government officials using private jets.



For the record Buhari cannot FIRE Emefiele. He needs 2/3 Senate and APC don't have the numbers.

LeOstrich:
I know the people behind this article are the same dudes in BlackStone who recently appointed Sanusi as their regional representative in Africa.

The aim of this useless write up is to ridicule the CBN's effort at curtailing imports which account for much of the forex demand.

No where in the article did the writer post an alternative rather the author mocked the banning of non essential items and went on to declare that we as a nation are not capable of feeding ourselves and so the need to maintain rice and sardine imports plus the very neccessary toothpicks.

This write up should serve as an opener to those of discerning minds of how the west wants to treat us as a dumping ground for their products.

The OP of course is another illiterate Taju posting out of Osogbo who neither understands what he just posted but is merely doing the job he was paid to circulate smear campaign.

As long as we have people like OP and his legion of daft APC Buharist zombies then know that this country can never ever summons its many problems.

colossus2:
If truly you are an economist, it's either you went to school but never went to class or you went to school, went to class, but was always sleeping

Beremx:
He must be sacked no doubt! That's for sure.

989900:
The CBN's faulty monetary policies are designed to make the banks rich, and the people poor.

And, this CBN governor is there to make sure of that.

Other countries exchange rates have since appreciated with 'rising oil prices' from $43 earlier this year, to $60-$65 now -- even the Rouble with all the sanctions.

trillville:
Have you also noted how the currency of oil producing countries appreciated between 2010-2014 when oil prices averaged over 100 dollars per barrel? Why didn't the Naira appreciate during this period? That's the question every smart thinking Nigerian should be asking?

colossus2:
You are something else

omolami:
Another NORTHERN campaign against the ibos in order to put a northerner in the post. Very soon Buhari will listen without hesitation. Pure northern agenda.period.

LeOstrich:
Start planting cocoa.

Every cent you generate can help shore up the naira.

Jorussia:
Also, there is a constitutional impediment that may prevent pmb from sacking him. pmb can only sack him by sending such request to the senate who will then pass a resolution to that effect.APC senators must close ranks for Godwin emefiele to be pushed out.

LeOstrich:
You fool. Can you tell me what exactly the author of the economist article was ranting about?

The author neither offered a viable alternative in shoring the Naira and went on to further ridicule us as a nation which can not feed itself and as such rice and sardines imports including toothpicks are essential products.

Try get sense you fool.

Beremx:
He must be sacked no doubt! That's for sure.

trillville:
Other countries grew massive reserves between 2010-2014 (when oil prices averaged over 100 dollars per barrel) so the stabilisation of oil prices brought a relief to their currencies. Why didn't Nigeria save money in its reserves between 2010 and 2014?

The strength of a currency is a lagging indicator. The damage we are experiencing today actually took place between 2010 and 2014. We are already in the deep middle of the storm. How long and by how much will our currency depreciate? Will it fall to 300 Naira? No one knows for sure.

The CBN Governors policy seems like Buharinomics of the 80's so Buhari has no reason to sack him. Will Buharinomics help our situation or make it worse? Hmm!

989900:
Looks like the word 'fool' is the new 'baby' in your chest of vocabulary -- good luck with it till it gets stale
Funny enough, you want me to 'get sense' when you have all your lobes shut down.
I stated my 'opinion' (which obviously is beyond your wheel house), only for an oik like you to come at me with foul words and a lame solution with 'plant cocoa trees" like 'exports' alone is the magic wand to arresting the falling Naira.

PPAngel:
How does a state fail?

It’s a question you can’t help asking yourself as you make your way in Haiti, through the chaos left by four severe tropical storms in 2008 and the destruction wrought by the 2010 earthquake—some of which is still evident on the streets of Port-au-Prince today, five years later. It’s not just the unrebuilt infrastructure that raises this question, but also the human and political waste caused by so many years of corrupting collaboration with the United States, the United Nations and outside nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

A state doesn’t fail because of some innate inferiority in its people. I make this obvious point only because people who don’t know Haiti often try, as subtly as they know how, to claim this is the case. They’re wrong: a state fails because of its history.


Haiti from its inception has been a peculiarly globalized entity. The slavery with which the French colony enriched itself was a global labor and agricultural phenomenon, bringing people from Africa to the Americas in order to serve as free labor on plantations owned by Europeans. Haiti’s revolution, too, was a global phenomenon, linking those same three continents. Haiti’s early debt was global; its economics under slavery and, later, the US occupation were global as well—and still are.

Many readers of The Nation may know something of the remarkable history of this country, since the magazine has been following it for more than a century. But for those of you coming to it cold: Haiti had unbelievably promising beginnings. Though tarnished by centuries of slavery, the country was the creation of some of the great geniuses of the 1700s. But the enormous potential of these singular men was destroyed by France, which kidnapped and killed some of Haiti’s ablest leaders, most notably Toussaint Louverture. In 1825, a scant two decades after Haitian independence was declared, France demanded an indemnity of 150 million francs (roughly estimated at $20 billion in today’s dollars) for the property lost by French plantation owners during the quite bloody, quite fiery revolution—one that Haiti had won.

Haiti was to compensate France not only for lost plantation lands and crops, but also for the loss of the Haitians themselves—i.e., for the right to be masters of their own bodies—since Haitian slaves had been France’s most valuable Caribbean asset. France backed up this demand with the threat of a full-blown blockade, and Haiti agreed to pay in exchange for France’s recognition. As a result, France duly recognized Haiti as an independent country (the United States, still a slave-owning nation and too geographically close for its own comfort, did not do so until 1862, in the midst of the Civil War). The huge debt payments were delivered assiduously by the Haitian government with money borrowed—conveniently—from French banks. Haiti also paid the interest on those loans in a timely fashion.

These reparations to France depleted Haiti’s already starved coffers and led to repeated financial crises within the country. They also led to privations, to an inability to develop domestically and to political instability—indeed, political turmoil, with presidents entering and leaving office sometimes biannually. France, in collusion with the United States, continued to bleed Haiti until related debts were finally paid off—in 1947!

This is how Haiti began to be a failed state.

France was not the only country to force Haiti down the road to failure. In 1909, US financiers began to lay the groundwork for an American occupation of Haiti. It was around that time that the National City Bank, based in New York, acquired a stake in Haiti’s central bank and created a railway to support American exploitation of Haitian resources, especially cheap labor (a little more expensive than out-and-out slavery, but…) and a variety of agricultural products for American consumption, such as sugar (and, later, the industrial production of baseballs and women’s undergarments). As Graham Greene wrote in The Comedians, his novel about Haiti in the 1960s: “It is astonishing how much money can be made out of the poorest of the poor with a little ingenuity.”

There was never any real excuse for the occupation. Haiti was unstable, the Americans said, after a sitting president was dragged from the French embassy by a mob and killed; shortly after, the marines descended. Well, Haiti had been unstable for years. The occupation was simply a mechanism to control Haiti while American businesses sucked value out of the country and made sure nationals of other countries could not. A year after the occupation’s end, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, the marine in charge of establishing and securing control, wrote: “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.”

Nothing that the occupation built was meant to benefit Haitians. As Ernest H. Gruening wrote in 1922 in this very magazine: “nobody, be he ever so kindly and human, can wholly transmute a military Occupation into a lawn party.” During the nineteen-year occupation, periodic rebellions and uprisings were brutally put down by the marines. Finally, in 1929, another massacre of Haitians provoked a review of the occupation by Congress, as well as an eventual pullout in 1934.

Nineteen years of occupation left enduring scars on Haitian society. The racism and segregation enforced by the marines led directly to the reactionary black-power rhetoric employed by François “Papa Doc” Duvalier as he rose to power in Haiti. The brutality and kleptocratic behavior of Duvalier’s administration, while not unknown in pre-occupation Haiti, had been honed to a fine point under the Americans’ regime. The nightmarish Duvalier and his corrupt son and successor, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”), fertilized the terrain on which Haiti as a failed state would grow.

Haiti has never existed in a vacuum. In fact, Haiti today is a creation of the world, its failures often purposefully molded by outsiders, though almost always in collusion with the Haitian elite, who stand to profit from these failures. In this, it is not dissimilar to other corrupt countries with a history of colonial exploitation.


Here is a contemporary example of how this works: under Bill Clinton, Haiti’s leaders were pressured to reduce the country’s longstanding tariffs on imported food (including rice) from 50 percent to about 3 percent. The United States then began dumping cheap, taxpayer-subsidized surplus rice on the Haitian market, ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, but actually so that it could dispose of an otherwise unsellable product.

Clinton’s policy was brilliant and double-edged. The Haitian politician who had to approve it was none other than the overthrown Jean-Bertrand Aristide, arguably the first freely elected president of Haiti. Aristide had been ousted in 1991, less than a year after his election, while George H.W. Bush (Papa Bush) looked the other way. Doubtless in return for Aristide’s acceptance of the lower tariff, as well as for other promises made, Clinton returned him to power. But once back in the National Palace, Aristide saw his authority undermined by the havoc and unrest that this very policy was causing in the countryside. The cheaper US rice undercut and effectively destroyed Haitian rice farming. A country that was largely self-sufficient in this staple in the 1980s was importing 80 percent of its rice by 2012.

So if Haiti can no longer feed itself, is this because it is a failed state? Haitians have rarely been fat, but the food crisis and food dependency began when weak Haitian leaders agreed to open the country’s markets to predatory global forces. This is the ugly face of “free trade.”

The crisis in rice farming also initiated a huge flow of rural people to the capital, because rice cultivators and their families could no longer survive in the countryside. The resulting overpopulation of the capital was a factor in the large number of people killed in the 2010 earthquake. After the quake, Clinton—by then the UN special envoy to Haiti, helping to run the reconstruction effort—apologized to the Haitian people. “It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2010. “I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.” He has called the policy a “devil’s bargain.” Nonetheless, imports of subsidized American rice only increased after the earthquake. Haiti imports as much as 50 percent of its food now, mostly from the United States. Today, Haiti is the second-biggest importer of US rice in the world.

Now let’s look at politics. In 1991, Aristide was overthrown. In 1994, Bill Clinton reinstated him. Aristide served out his truncated five-year term and was elected president once more in 2000, only to be overthrown again, in 2004, this time under Baby Bush (George W.).

For seven years after that second coup, Aristide lived in US-imposed exile in South Africa. He was allowed back into Haiti only in 2011, when President Obama, given various factors, could no longer reasonably prevent his return.

Though Aristide was, for at least two decades, the overwhelming choice of the Haitian people, his support has dissipated in the chaos caused by two anti-democratic coups and a barrage of natural disasters, as well as the generational shift that has come with new voters who simply don’t remember him. Even so, the current Haitian president, a conservative Duvalierist who is another puppet of the United States, has recently put Aristide under illegal house arrest, fearing his potential as a disrupter as Haiti begins the long-overdue slog to a new round of elections.

That Haitian president is Michel Martelly, a pop singer whose slender victory in 2011 was engineered with the collusion of the United States, the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS). With his pro-business stance, Martelly is a lot more to the liking of American corporate interests in Haiti than Aristide. Among his greatest achievements as president: diverting earthquake-relief money to help extend and modernize transportation in northern Haiti, far from the earthquake’s path, as well as expanding the incentives to seduce low-wage light industry to Haiti (mainly in the north) and freeing up gold-, silver- and copper-mining contracts for giant multinational extraction companies to begin excavating (also in the north).

Is the failure of the democratic experiment in Haiti the fault of a people who cannot govern themselves? No, it’s the fault of outside interests and their Haitian collaborators, who together continue to hold the reins of power in Haiti.

By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that Aristide was democracy personified. He was flawed, but so what? Let’s put it this way: unlike Aristide, the Duvaliers—both Papa Doc and Baby Doc—were grotesque violators of free speech, honest elections and human rights, but still they managed, in the shadow of the United States, not to be overthrown for almost thirty years. Aristide, in that same shadow (Haiti hasn’t moved!), was overthrown within eight months of taking office, and then overthrown a second time. This is not about a state’s failure; it’s about failure imposed on a state.


Let’s also consider corruption, another symptom of failed states. Many say the Haitian government is disorganized, but no one is fooled: actually, the Haitian kleptocracy has been carefully organized—especially during the occupation—to be porous and incompetent, to allow for corruption. It exists to feed those politicians who kowtow to outside interests. It is a mechanism into which money is poured and then siphoned off. The Duvaliers merely perfected what the occupation handed down.

Since 1915, the United States has treated Haitian governments as, at best, rubber stamps for US policy, American businesses working in Haiti, and Haitian-run businesses friendly to American interests. For almost the entire twentieth century, only US-approved Haitians could be president. The embassy looked the other way at internal political repression, to say nothing of continuing starvation in the countryside, as long as Haitian governments were friendly—or at least anticommunist, like Papa Doc’s. Any leader who seemed to have an agenda that put the Haitian people first was thrown out, including Daniel Fignolé, a wildly popular political figure who was in office less than a month in 1957, shortly before the Duvalier dictatorship; and, of course, Aristide, who slipped in during a moment of change in Haiti and the world (post-Duvalier and post–Cold War, respectively) but was quickly sent packing.

Ever since Aristide was deposed for the second time, in 2004, there has been another occupation of Haiti, this time by the United Nations. A decade later, some 7,000 international military and police personnel still operate from the huge, modern UN Logistics Base near the airport (which is no longer named for François Duvalier but for Louverture, another coup victim sent summarily overseas). From “Log Base,” as it is called, peacekeepers have been sent out to quell dissent, resulting in many casualties. They’ve rounded up the discontented and they’ve developed informants within progressive and popular movements. They ride around town in casual pickup trucks with gunners in the back, facing the trailing traffic.

All of this is done with the ostensible motivation of protecting the Haitian people and keeping things secure. As The Nation’s Gruening wrote concerning the marine occupation in 1922: “this proceeds under the guise of benevolence…. Colonel Russell [the head of the occupation at the time] told me that it was the two million Haitian country people that he wanted to help, and that he was very fond of them but [that he was] against the ‘three hundred agitators in Port au Prince….’ The Occupation’s affection for the Haitian proletariat is truly touching. Obviously if the [agitators are] eliminated, the most docile and the cheapest labor supply that a concessionnaire ever dreamed of will be easily available. Twenty cents a day is the current Haitian wage.” Today, thanks to the machinations of American businesspeople in Haiti and colluding legislators in Washington, the minimum wage has been kept low: to less than $5 a day. Haitians’ 1922 pay comes to roughly $2.82 in today’s dollars. So, in ninety-three years, the value of a Haitian’s labor has increased by little more than $2.

One final problem must be understood in picking apart the failure of the Haitian state, and that is the overwhelming presence in Haiti—especially in Port-au-Prince and in Cap-Haïtien—of nongovernmental organizations, usually foreign-based. Unscientific estimates suggest there are some 10,000 NGOs operating in a country smaller than Maryland with a population of 10 million.

These NGOs, each with its own projects, don’t operate under any kind of umbrella; nor are they truly regulated. What they do, unintentionally, is substitute their own services for the services that a government should provide. They prop up the kleptocratic state, a mechanism for distribution of corruption. Over the years, the United States has spent billions through the Agency for International Development, a principal funder of NGOs, in an attempt to “develop” Haiti—and has achieved effectively nothing. A report by the World Bank on its own role in Haiti from 1986 through 2002 stated that “the outcome of the [World Bank] assistance program is rated unsatisfactory (if not highly so), the institutional development impact, negligible, and the sustainability of the few benefits that have accrued, unlikely.”

The end of Haiti, its utter ruin, has been predicted since the state was declared in 1804. The outside world believed a country run by former slaves could never survive; Haitians looked around and sometimes agreed. In 1944, the legendary Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain published Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew), set in a deforested, drought-plagued landscape. When I first arrived in Haiti in 1986, the environmental end of the country was already considered imminent. Everyone would starve and die; AIDS, too, was about to take its toll.

Today, Haiti is still deforested, the environment abused and ignored. Much of this has to do with dire poverty and government negligence, as well as foreign and domestic exploitation. But in spite of deforestation and drought, despite mudslides and hurricanes and earthquakes, despite the destruction of rice cultivation, the collapse of Haiti’s sugar industry, the neglect of its coffee cultivators, the ongoing crisis of AIDS, tuberculosis and, now, cholera—Haitians survive.

Is this because they have a special resilience, that “dignity in poverty” that visitors like to rattle on about? Nope. It’s because the situation has been so bad for so long that almost every tiny Haitian village has sent at least one person out of the country into the huge diaspora, and those wanderers (equal to about 20 percent of the on-island population) have been sending their dutiful remittances back, even over generations. This immense brain drain has adversely affected everything on the island, but it has also been crucial to Haiti’s survival as a failed state.

Many small, formerly agricultural countries survive this way in the globalized world. The Philippines is another good example: its government, like Haiti’s, provides few services and little employment for its growing population, and instead sends its people out to participate in a global economy from which, although poorly paid by employers abroad, they can send home enough money to keep people alive on the islands. Sri Lanka, Vietnam and many other countries survive in a similar fashion.


Living off such remittances, those who still reside in the home country are less likely to find themselves at that edge of desperation where political organization and unrest become urgent and necessary. Grassroots change is abortive or endlessly deferred, a situation that is much preferred by the small local elite, which provides nothing and thereby gains everything. Haiti’s ongoing crisis is the product of global forces, and only huge, unlikely changes in international behaviors—especially on the part of the biggest, most abusive nations and organizations—will allow the Haitians themselves to turn things around.

barcanista:
reason is simple. Nigeria is import dependent country. We even import petroleum products into the country. How many oil producing country do that? You want to strengthen your currency when you are import dependent. How possible is that? Do you want to blame CBN?

trillville:
Other countries grew massive reserves between 2010-2014 (when oil prices averaged over 100 dollars per barrel) so the stabilisation of oil prices brought a relief to their currencies. Why didn't Nigeria save money in its reserves between 2010 and 2014?

The strength of a currency is a lagging indicator. The damage we are experiencing today actually took place between 2010 and 2014. We are already in the deep middle of the storm. How long and by how much will our currency depreciate? Will it fall to 300 Naira? No one knows for sure.

The CBN Governors policy seems like Buharinomics of the 80's so Buhari has no reason to sack him. Will Buharinomics help our situation or make it worse? Hmm!

Jorussia:
If pmb sacks him,i believe my Igbo brothers will read different meanings to it.

barcanista:
Guy, how can you blame the Monetary policy of CBN on the depreciation of the Naira and the fall in the reserve? For the record, the CBN only manage what a country's has, it isn't in-charge of fiscal policies. The depreciation in the Naira should be blamed on failure of government to revive the real sector and not implement policies to discourage import. You can't continue to be importing and expect the naira to appreciate. As for the reserve, it still lies on the FG and not the CBN. CBN manages whatever government give to them. Our reserve has been mostly spent on revaluation of the Naira (because the real value of the naira is far lower than what we are seeing). Though I want the CBN to stop that policy and allow the Naira to its real value.

trillville:
Make hay while the sun shines!
Why didn't we build refineries when nigeria was flooded with money between 2010-2015? How long would it have taken us to build modular refineries. Yaradua already put plans to build three green field refineries before his unfortunate death? Must it be private individuals that build refineries?
If we had refineries that meet our demand would the Naira be depreciating as it is now?

trillville:
I never blamed any CBN governor. Ex president Jonathan is the major culprit in this mess we are faint now, and this is the sole reason I have stated on numerous occasion that he is the worst president nigeria has ever had.

LeOstrich:
[size=18pt]The sophisticated Yorubanese should as a matter of urgency restart their cocoa plantation economy to shore the useless Nigerian naira because sooner or later this fraud will come to an end and with it will be an end of free petrodollars.

I don't know why you people are so full of hate.

The current CBN governor is a seasoned, tested and trusted economist who was prior to his appointment an executive professional in the banking sector.

Why can't you people rise above your petty jealous ethnic sentiments?

Sanusi who you dolts continue to ride his dik was not in any way qualified to occupy the office of the CBN governor and his legacy broke the hegenomy you guys once enjoyed in the banking sector.

For how can we explain a situation where Unity Bank formerly Bank of the north was more viable than Intercontinental Bank? The useless Sanusi reduced Wema bank to a regional bank but left Unity Bank and even fought vigourisly for Jaiz bank.

The situation today is that most of your people lost interests and lucrative jobs in the banking sector and you foolish slaves still ride sanusi's dik till thy kingdom come.

When i call you people Slaves tomorow some idiota will ban me.


[/size]

trillville:
Make hay while the sun shines!
Why didn't we build refineries when nigeria was flooded with money between 2010-2015? How long would it have taken us to build modular refineries. Yaradua already put plans to build three green field refineries before his unfortunate death? Must it be private individuals that build refineries?
If we had refineries that meet our demand would the Naira be depreciating as it is now?

NgeneUkwenu:
It is very obvious to an average discerning mind, that jonathan appointed a numbskull and empty brain like himself to man a very strategic economic policy making organ of the government.

Godwin Emefiele is the most incompetent CBN governor to have occupied that post!
This very man saw to the devaluation and deprectiating of the naira from 157 naira to 230 Naira to a dollar within the space of 1 year!!

This man is a disaster to the economy, I think as long as he remains there as the Governor, Nigerian should forget about the word called Change
Buhari Sack him now!



[size=15pt]The Economists Mocks Godwin Emefiele, The CBN Governor:
[/size]


THE ECONOMIST believes it's weird for Nigeria to place a forex ban on toothpick,sardines and 38 other items.


READ: CBN Stops the Sale of Forex for 40 Items [SEE LIST]

CENTRAL bankers may talk in martial terms of defending currencies against bloodthirsty speculators, but they seldom suffer wounds more grievous than a bruising of their egos. They can, however, cause untold harm to economies, as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is doing in puffing up its exchange rate.

The naira has been hit hard by a fall in the price of oil, Nigeria’s main export. The official exchange rate has slumped by almost 20% over the past year to about 196 naira per dollar. The black market rate, a more accurate gauge, is close to 230. Instead of allowing the naira to devalue, the central bank is trying to defend it by blocking imports. It has drawn up a list of disfavoured goods, and will not grant foreign exchange to import them.

Godwin Emefiele, the governor of the central bank, said he wants to conserve foreign reserves (which have fallen by about a fifth over the past year and now cover only six months of imports) and stimulate local production. “Nigeria cannot attain its true [potential] by simply importing everything,” he said.

The hit list appears to have been drawn up by someone wandering around a home and a building site and randomly pointing at items. It includes Indian incense, toothpicks and wire rods as well as more obvious luxuries such as private jets (demand for which could be slashed by simply barring government officials from flying in them). It also includes basics such as rice and tinned fish. Nigeria does not produce enough of these things to feed itself, but no matter. The nation must be shielded from foreign sardines.

Economists find the policy baffling. Central banks usually prop up their currencies if they are worried about inflation, or allow them to devalue to depress imports and stimulate exports. Nigeria, by contrast, appears to be set on achieving both an uncompetitive exchange rate and higher inflation. Whereas many investors were impressed by the previous CBN governor, Lamido Sanusi, who was sacked for exposing corruption, they fret about the harm being inflicted by the current one. Some wonder which would be worse for Nigeria: allowing him to serve the remaining four years of his term or undermining the independence of the central bank by sacking him.

Culled from The Economist