DOGGED PRESIDENT BUHARI SAYS NO TO NAIRA DEVALUATION

President Muhammadu Buhari

A statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, on Thursday quoted the President as speaking at a meeting he had with Nigerians living in Kenya late on Wednesday.

President Muhammadu Buhari has again rejected calls for the devaluation of the naira, saying he has yet to be convinced that the country and its people will derive any tangible benefit from such a move.

Buhari, who is currently on a three-day state visit to Kenya, was said to have maintained that while export-driven economies could benefit from the devaluation of their currencies, such a move would only result in further inflation and hardship for the poor and middle class in Nigeria’s import-dependent economy.

The President said he had no intention of bringing further hardship on the country’s poor, who he noted had suffered enough already.

He likened further devaluation of the naira to having the currency “killed.”

Buhari added that proponents of devaluation must work harder to convince him that ordinary Nigerians would gain anything from it.

The President also rejected suggestions that the Central Bank of Nigeria should resume the sale of foreign exchange to Bureaux De Change, saying that the BDC business had become a scam and a drain on the economy.

“We had just 74 of the bureaux in 2005; now, they have grown to about 2,800,” he noted.

Buhari alleged that some bank and government officials used surrogates to run the BDCs and prosper at public expense by obtaining foreign exchange from the government at official rates and selling it at much higher rates.

“We will use our foreign exchange for industry, spare parts and the development of needed infrastructure. We don’t have the dollar to give to the BDCs. Let them go and get it from wherever they can, other than the central bank,” Buhari told the gathering.

The President reaffirmed his conviction that about a third of petroleum subsidy payments under the previous administration was bogus.

“They just stamped papers and collected our foreign exchange,” he stated.

Buhari appealed to Nigerians studying abroad to bear with his administration as it strives to address the challenges they were facing as a result of the new foreign exchange measures.

He said that he was optimistic that the Nigerian economy would stabilise soon with the efficient implementation of the measures and policies that had been introduced by his administration.

Source: PUNCH

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