With the sort of gloom and doom now pervading the socio-political atmosphere in Nigeria due to the on­going financial crisis, humour seems to be the best antidote for easing stress.
That is why I could not resist starting this article with a practical joke which a friend recently sent to me via whatsapp and it goes thus :“ President Buhari was in a meeting with all the governors, Senators and members of House of Representatives, Federal Exec­utive Council members, NNPC directors and all fuel importers when news came that the CBN was being robbed.Buhari said: how is that possible when all the thieves are here seated with me?”
Now, I was supposed to laugh and forward the joke to other contacts, but here is how l responded: “Per­haps, Mr president has once again forgotten that the civil servants who were not seated with him in the meeting, are worse thieves. Recall that after he took over the reins of power on May 29 last year,he treated top civil servants like ‘blue eye princes’ , but they nevertheless took undue advantage of him by ‘pad­ding’ the 2016 appropriation bill, which is a perfidy that has turned out to be President Buhari’s biggest embarrassment in government, till date “.
Jokes aside, President Muhamadu Buhari’s war against corruption since he mounted Nigeria’s saddle of leadership some nine months ago has been unprec­edented.
Given his zero tolerance for corruption under­scored by his motto ‘Nigeria must kill corruption before corruption kills Nigeria’, a death knell for cor­ruption has been sounded and no one should be in doubt as to whether or not corruption would ebb in Nigeria under Buhari’s watch. It is just a question of how soon the mission would be accomplished.
However, while Mr. President is trying to rein in corruption, the price of crude oil, the commodity that Nigeria depends on for roughly 95% of her foreign exchange earnings, has been tumbling dramatically and in the process, it has shed nearly 70%, due mainly to a global supply glut, and triggering what can best be de­scribed as panic attack in government circles.
Consequently, a plethora of policies are now in place, including barring of 41 items from access to forex from CBN. The measures are aimed at stemming further hemorrhaging of the economy, which has become fi­nancially anaemic and tending towards asphyxiation, as it suffers the double jeopardy of massive corruption by unscrupulous politicians and civil servants as well as drastic reduction of forex income on acount of the inter­national oil price slump.
Notable amongst the 41 items barred from being funded from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) are items like toothpicks which can be sourced locally as Nigeria is essentially geographically located in a rain forest zone which makes the raw materials for this prod­uct widely available in the country.
While Western establishment media organs like the London-based Economist magazine and New York- lo­cated Time magazine have bashed the Nigerian govern­ment for introducing capital control measures to save the naira, financial institutions such as JP Morgan, have delisted Nigeria from her emerging markets shares in­dex, thereby causing huge exit of portfolio investments from Nigeria by international equity and portfolio man­agers.
The International Monetary Fund, lMF has also weighed in with advice that Nigeria should devalue her currency, but Nigerian authorities have justifiably re­sisted the proposition and rather than heed the Brenton Woods advice, Nigeria has taken the option of defend­ing the naira by maintaining a fixed exchange rate as opposed to a floating rate, which is the preference of Western financial institutions.
This is in spite of the fact that there is historical evidence indicating that England, during the medieval times adopted a form of capital control. That happened when Border Control Act 1300 AD was enacted by King Richard ll, prohibiting the export of metals which was a sort of means of foreign exchange at that time.
King Henry the Vlll, lifted the ban in 1858 after it was deemed that England’s economy was solid enough to float her currency or open it to international competition. Simi­larly, in the USA , during the Great Recession (1914-1944), under the watch of President Franklin D Roosevelt, FDR some form of capital control measures were also intro­duced and the founder of Keynesian economics, whom the concept was named after, Lord Maynard Keynes, is known to have been one of the advocates of capital restrictions as a means of pulling the USA out of the Great Depression.
It is hypocritical that Nigeria is now being punished and sabotaged for adopting policies employed by the leaders of the capitalist world, the UK and USA, when they faced similar economic problems. Frustratingly, despite the drastic measures introduced to stabilise the naira, it now exchanges with the USA dollar in the parallel market for between N300-N400. A combination of factors are respon­sible for the continuos pressure on the naira and chief of which is that, about forty percent,40% of Nigeria’s forex outflow is for the importation of petroleum products.
The two next biggest single tickets outflows that are gulping forex after fuel imports are payments of school fees abroad and medical bills, which are also estimated to be about two billion dollars apiece. The third single item is the cost of importation of rice which is estimated at $1.8 billion annually.
It seems Mr president considers payment of fees for procurement of education and healthcare abroad as drains on the forex treasury. Therefore, such payments are now candidates for addition to the 41 items earlier put on the prohibition list.
To be concluded tomorrow
.Onyibe is a former Commissioner in Delta State.

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