₦airaland Forum

Fellow Nigerians,

It's time to ‪#‎GetYourBrainBack‬

PLUNGING NAIRA - BEFORE YOU BLAME EMEFIELE, LOOK AT YOURSELF

Kenneth Ezaga

It is either I do not understand economics and how exchange rates work or a vast majority of us Nigerians still don’t get how we have wrecked our country with our own curious choices. Just this morning I was listening to the radio and the lady on air went on and on about how she thought CBN governor Godwin Emefiele was incompetent and should be sacked because the naira was now exchanging at 309 or so to the USD. That view pretty much echoes the sentiments expressed by many people I know and it amazes me that there are Nigerians who actually think there is some magic POLICY that can make the naira strong in the near term. If my economics and my understanding of the way the world works are right, then that is as far from the truth as Jesus Christ is black.

The simple fact of the matter is that apart from oil that accounts for over 90% of our revenues, we really don’t have much of an economy. We hardly produce anything, we import even toothpicks, so exactly what policy is going to be implemented that will turn Nigeria into a top exporting economy in the near term? Where are our Apples, IBMs, Disneys, GMs, General Electrics, Coca Colas, Empire State buildings, Statues of Liberties, Lockheeds, Citibanks, JP Morgans, ExxonMobils, NBAs, Super Bowls etc?

Let me bring that closer home. There was a time long ago when Nigeria had a truly strong economy and the naira was one to the dollar - even exchanged for higher than the USD, but that Nigeria is not this Nigeria. Sadly that Nigeria was laid by the British, and this Nigeria (if you don’t believe in the nonsensical imperialist conspiracies like me) - fueled by the DAMAGING Indigenisation Decree, has been the creation of us Nigerians. Back then we had a booming economy. We were either the top, or among the top exporters, of timber, cocoa, groundnuts, rubber, palm oil, etc, in the world. Nigerians not only holidayed at home in their villages, at Yankari Games Reserve, at Obudu Cattle Ranch, at Oguta Lake, at Ikogosi springs, at Gurara Falls, at Mambilla Plateau, etc, we attracted international tourists who brought in loads of foreign exchange. Even Nigerian schools were foreign exchange earners because they attracted foreign students. We had different car assembly plants - Peugeot, Volkswagen, Anamco etc. Nigerian government officials only bought vehicles assembled in Nigeria for official cars. We had a thriving sports industry. We were not Man United or Chelsea fans, we were Rangers or IICC fans. We had the Nduka Odizors, people made money from sports. We also had companies like Lennards and Bata producing school shoes in their thousands, we had the thriving Nigerian Airways and the Aviation School in the north that produced some of the best pilots in the world. In those days if you were brilliant you were respected much more than the crass money-miss-road contractors of today. Most of the Aje Butters I knew had fathers who were university dons. Back then it meant something to ‘know book’. Our textile industry was alive and well. Just recently I watched a news report on the textile industry in Nigeria on CCTV News. Though the main focus was on the comatose status of the industry, I was stunned by the gigantic Kaduna Textile Mill built in 1957. I could go on and on.

Today however, no thanks to our parents (and we must call them out the way Wole Soyinka did his generation) and many of us (and we should be remembered for failing our children if we continue like this), we have destroyed everything. Today for instance Nigerian football (which comes easy to me obviously) doesn’t appeal to us, we have to fly across thousands of miles to watch ‘our’ clubs play. Every year we collectively burn billions of naira being fans of clubs that give us nothing back, but some ‘entertainment value’ - simple pleasures for which we are ready to destroy the future of our children. Well people, payback time is here. Even with our ta-she-re money we all want to wear designer clothes and carry designer bags, Armani, Givenchy, Louis Vuitton etc. We all want to drive jeeps with American specs, our children must now school overseas and acquire the necessary accents to come back home and bamboozle their ‘bush and crass’ contemporaries that they left behind. Who holidays in Nigeria anymore, is there Disneyland here? No one buys made-in-Nigeria school bags for their children, after all no Superman or Incredible Hulk or Cinderella on them. We are no longer top exporters of anything and the demise of oil means we have zilch... zero. A country of 170m fashion-conscious people has no textile industry. We take delight in showing how our made-in-Switzerland Aso Ebi is different class to everyone else’s. When we help our musicians grow and pay them millions, they repay us by immediately shipping the monies overseas to produce their “i-don-dey-different-level”music videos. It makes no difference that distinctly Zulu dancers are dancing to a Nigerian highlife song. As stars concerned they also wed and holiday overseas to impress us all. All the musicians who acknowledge their Ajegunle roots now speak in a cocktail of strange accents to symbolise how much they have blown their monies overseas.

Were we a more serious people, the highly popular Kingsway Stores of the past would probably have a thousand outlets pan Nigeria today supporting a massive agriculture industry among others, but today we have the likes of SPAR, Shoprite, dominating the retail industry while Kingsway is dead. And we Nigerians make it a special point to shop from the Oyibos who have ‘cleaner shops’, ‘better this and better that’. For our personal pleasure we don’t mind them dominating us in our own backyard and shipping proceeds overseas.

I could go on and on, but I don tire. Even as you are reading this, stop for a moment and look around you. What you see will probably explain why we are lucky it is not N1000 to the USD yet. And don’t think for a moment that it cannot get there. Just continue to wear your Armani gear and Swiss-made lace, continue to spend your money on Man United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Barca and encourage your children to do same. (My article in This Day tomorrow is on the Nigerian champions Enyimba FC - Nigeria’s most successful club - not having a sponsor, yet Nigerian brands pay over N600m to Man United and Arsenal for sponsorship to impress us.) Ehhh, no problem, continue to tell me the NPFL is rubbish or the clubs should clean up their act if they want sponsorship, mo gbo. Don’t curtail your interest in choice wines ( we were the number one champagne consumers in the world in 2015), continue to love your American specs, cheer the education ministry for letting schools sink to pitiable levels, don’t fight them to improve our schools, don’t chide them for letting schools drop Nigerian history and embrace British, American and whatever else curricula. Carry on with your love of French wines and Chinese silk, don’t bother about Jamiu Alli when there is Roger Federer. Stock up on your Italian, American, British products which you cannot live without, including the ‘baby soft’ toilet rolls produced only in that small unique village in England - the days are long gone since you were a broke student who used wet newspapers to wipe your butt. Don’t even consider holidaying in Nigeria, it’s too dangerous - you have to fulfill your dream of being Nigeria’s Henry Ford. Don’t listen to people like me who have a wardrobe full of only cheap adire that is actually cheaper than just one of your Tom Ford blazers. Please keep dressing in fine silk made in some exotic place so you can be addressed accordingly. Finally keep letting corrupt leaders who have looted your commonwealth and shipped all the monies overseas get away because to attack them does not fit your political narrative. Let us continue with the fine life, let us all continue to work for Oyibo.

But don’t forget that there is payback time and Emefiele is not your problem. Time for us all to look in the mirror.

ATTN: oam4j, mynd44

OK!

Eleyi gaa gan o

Brilliant. This should make Front Page. In fact, this should be printed out and circulated to all homes in Nigeria. ASAP!

Tell that to our dullard president who keeps flying from one kwontry to another without any tangible result

The guy above me is really ignorant. Did Buhari decide to patronise EPL & La Liga to cause flight of our much needed capital that's affecting the Naira value?

kay29000:
Brilliant. This should make Front Page. In fact, this should be printed out and circulated to all homes in Nigeria. ASAP!

I recomend in addition to the above, that civic studies be re-introduced into educational system. The poster between you and I even thinks it is Buhari's fault already. Buhari didn't help us develope a taste for everything foreign like the article in focus has highlighted.

Respect!!!

PoliticalThuG:
Tell that to our dullard president who keeps flying from one kwontry to another without any tangible result

Someone writes a brilliant piece like that and all you could do was display your hatred for another man.. anyway moving on.

@OP, I agree largely with your posts but I think that's a very optimistic way of looking at it. If you look deeply at Nigeria's problems and the root cause you just want to pack up and leave because the solution keeps getting farther away, almost like digging an endless hole. One of our biggest problem is laziness, intellectual and physical. Let's take a look at our educational system, a girl works hard, reads her behind off and then a lecturer fails her because she hasn't agreed to sleep with him. Tell me if that kind of girl has a chance to run she won't because she's trying to support her country. These lecturers are so lazy and dumb that they can't even work hard enough to come up with ways to make themselves look attractive enough for the girls to be the ones chasing after them. A farmer producing rice has to compete with guys getting all sorts of waivers to sell at lower than production cost all because they know someone. Foreign investors can't invest confidently because some other government can come in and just cancel everything because they want to bring in their guys not so that those ones can come in to do anything productive or creative but whose sole purpose is to come up with ways to steal money.

What we need is government not to be as involved in business. The impunity and corruption spoils everything. Private companies also need to step up, what were we looking at when Shoprite came and took over. Fact of the matter is people like nice things so you can't blame people from moving on from the dirty Nigerian owned stores to the cleaner foreign owned brands. We've been busy watching our favourite politician drive their Rolls Royce and fly their PJs. Those things made us feel good because it made us feel we were living in a rich country. All corruption is bad, all stealing is bad but I'll say this I like the Ben Bruce way of stealing, I also like the Tinubu way of stealing. These guys didn't steal only to turn around and buy Bentleys for chics and buy property all around the world. They were smart enough to take that money and re-invest it in viable businesses in the country and not just creating businesses for the sole purpose of hiding stolen money. Drug money built one of the most successful cities in the US, Miami, afterall. Problem is intellectual laziness, indiscipline, corruption, guys with no imagination are the ones we've allowed rule us. These guys have infected us with their "let's get rich without any evidence of where the wealth came from" disease. This is the reason regular guys support the corrupt because even they feel like that's the only way they can get rich, so that empathy is shown towards them. For our entertainment industry to reach its full potential we need guys to put in work. Its all about the image, a guy releases one single and all of a sudden he's driving a Range and rocking different pairs of designer sneakers everyday. The regular guy is thinking let me get in the studio and release some garbage so that I too can be balling. Artists are spending more time chasing politicians around for money and sleeping at companies like Guinness, Pernod Ricard and so on than actually improving their art and building a brilliant to team to work out a real revenue generating model. Nigerians just want to make money and enjoy life, no one wants to put in the work.

Linnyx,

You are the second person to excite my noetic capacity this weekend.

The first being the writer of the letter to Tompolo.

God bless you!

mrmetoo1:
Someone writes a brilliant piece like that and all you could do was display your hatred for another man.. anyway moving on.

@OP, I agree largely with your posts but I think that's a very optimistic way of looking at it. If you look deeply at Nigeria's problems and the root cause you just want to pack up and leave because the solution keeps getting farther away, almost like digging an endless hole. One of our biggest problem is laziness, intellectual and physical. Let's take a look at our educational system, a girl works hard, reads her behind off and then a lecturer fails her because she hasn't agreed to sleep with him. Tell me if that kind of girl has a chance to run she won't because she's trying to support her country. These lecturers are so lazy and dumb that they can't even work hard enough to come up with ways to make themselves look attractive enough for the girls to be the ones chasing after them. A farmer producing rice has to compete with guys getting all sorts of waivers to sell at lower than production cost all because they know someone. Foreign investors can't invest confidently because some other government can come in and just cancel everything because they want to bring in their guys not so that those ones can come in to do anything productive or creative but whose sole purpose is to come up with ways to steal money.

What we need is government not to be as involved in business. The impunity and corruption spoils everything. Private companies also need to step up, what were we looking at when Shoprite came and took over. Fact of the matter is people like nice things so you can't blame people from moving on from the dirty Nigerian owned stores to the cleaner foreign owned brands. We've been busy watching our favourite politician drive their Rolls Royce and fly their PJs. Those things made us feel good because it made us feel we were living in a rich country. All corruption is bad, all stealing is bad but I'll say this I like the Ben Bruce way of stealing, I also like the Tinubu way of stealing. These guys didn't steal only to turn around and buy Bentleys for chics and buy property all around the world. They were smart enough to take that money and re-invest it in viable businesses in the country and not just creating businesses for the sole purpose of hiding stolen money. Drug money built one of the most successful cities in the US, Miami, afterall. Problem is intellectual laziness, indiscipline, corruption, guys with no imagination are the ones we've allowed rule us. These guys have infected us with their "let's get rich without any evidence of where the wealth came from" disease. This is the reason regular guys support the corrupt because even they feel like that's the only way they can get rich, so that empathy is shown towards them. For our entertainment industry to reach its full potential we need guys to put in work. Its all about the image, a guy releases one single and all of a sudden he's driving a Range and rocking different pairs of designer sneakers everyday. The regular guy is thinking let me get in the studio and release some garbage so that I too can be balling. Artists are spending more time chasing politicians around for money and sleeping at companies like Guinness, Pernod Ricard and so on than actually improving their art and building a brilliant to team to work out a real revenue generating model. Nigerians just want to make money and enjoy life, no one wants to put in the work.

your points seem pointless to me


no offence tho

HMMM GREAT ONE. GOD BLESS NIGERIA. WE ARE D PROCLEM OF OURSELFS

I've seen this piece before , I thought it was written by okechukwu Nwanguma of NOPRIN (Network On Police Reform In Nigeria) who's Kenneth Ezaga again kwa?!

@ OP, you forgot to include the cost of medical tourism. Our leaders destroyed our medical systems and moved overseas for check up. I learnt the President is traveling again fr check up. At whose expense, not Nigerians? Do we have any president coming to Nigeria for any reason?

So on point...