₦airaland Forum

This is my point of view about the economy of Nigeria, and what i feel is the real problem and possible solutions.
A major determinant of a country's economy is her balance of trade. we sell to other countries to earn dollars, and buy from other countries with dollars, the difference can be a deficit or a surplus.
What Nigeria sells is crude oil. The government sells crude oil to earn dollars, sells the dollars to her citizen through the bank to import what we consume. the problem is that our demand for dollars is more than supply, that is why even when oil was selling at $100/barrel, we could not save much. Not everything was embezzled (my opinion).
When price of oil crashed, supply of dollars also crashed, but demand did not. We still need dollars to pay fro refined oil, health tourism, goods, drugs etc from other countries.

The solution is two fold- increase supply of dollars, or reduce demand for dollars.
To increase supply of dollars, we need to consider other things we as a country can export to earn forex, it can be agricultural products, mineral resources, manufactured goods etc.
To reduce demand, we first have to look at statistics of our usage of forex. Can't remember where I read it, but i read that over 50% of our forex is spent on refined oil, a sizable percentage on food, then drugs, cars, luxury items etc. If we can refine our oil, and increase our agricultural production to meet national demand, our demand for dollars will reduce by 70%, which will reduce the pressure on naira.

Until our huge trade deficit is corrected, the naira will continue to struggle against the dollars.

It is Buhari fault

Horlufemi:
It is Buhari fault

it's his fault that you didn't go to farm abi

Diversify..diversify.......yet a fool will spend billions of dollars looking for oyel in the north.....yet they keep shouting diversify! Diversify!!


We are fooling ourselves here