Ex-NACCIMA Boss List Path To Econmomic Growth

The National Economic Management Team will make progress only if the Central Bank of Nigeria performs the constitutional responsibilities of sound management of the national currency, a stakeholder has posited.

The team was recently inaugurated with President Goodluck Jonathan as its chairman and the Finance Minister, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, as the coordinator.

Dr Simon Okolo, a former President of the Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA), said this in an interview with newsmen in Aba, Abia last Tuesday.

He said that the team’s work to reposition or kick start the economic recovery would be easy if it could convince the CBN to stop capturing Nigeria’s dollar revenue and substitute same as naira allocation.

Okolo said the real sector had the capacity and potential for job creation in the economy, stressing that the economic managers had enormous task to make progress with relatively short period of time.

He said the CBN started with faulty and inappropriate handling of Nigeria’s crude oil export proceeds since 1985.

The former NACCIMA boss said this had resulted to economic doom for the nation in spite of increased revenue from crude oil sales.

He said the CBN was not able to make progress with the substitution of the dollar revenue as naira to the three tiers of government.

Okolo said the bank should give out dollar allocations through domiciliary dollar accounts with deposit money banks, which had the capacity to convert them to naira with members of the public and private sector operatives in need of foreign currency.

“This has put pressure on the dollar to give ground for the naira to appreciate, not vice versa, as steadily maintained by the CBN,’’ he said

Okolo said there ought to be price stability in the economy if the CBN had adopted extension of dollar certificate to the three tiers of government through domiciliary accounts with deposit money banks.

According to him, it would have also induced enabling production environment which will help propel the private sector on the driver’s seat of the economy.

He said that CBN’s adoption of the opposite practice had translated into its continuous losing war with macro-economic instability and persistent excess liquidity, non-conducive business climate and de-industrialisation and economic doom.

“Under the guise of defending the naira, the CBN has continued to fritter away valuable foreign reserves and current inflows of foreign exchange on funding crippling activities such as treasury looting, smuggling and currency speculation and thus exposed the economy to high levels of fiscal deficits.