KANO, AUGUST 25, 2016 – Muhammadu Sanusi ll, emir of Kano, has said that the practice whereby Nigerian businessmen obtain dollars at official rate and resell at a higher rate at the parallel market is still continuing under the watch of President Muhammed Buhari.“We have created our own billionaires since 2015 from foreign exchange subsidy,” the emir said in a speech at 15th Joint National Council on Development Planning meeting held in Kano yesterday.
They got the dollar at N197 and price their goods at N300, he said in his speech tilled “Nigeria: The search for new growth model.”
“For instance, when the CBN was selling dollar at N197 and people were buying at N300, if I sit down in my garden and pick up my phone I would have enough people to call in the industry to get 10 million dollars at officials rate and sell at N300 and make a profit of over N1bn and if I do that four times in a year, for doing nothing I would have earned N4bn.
“And people were telling us that this policy was to help the poor. We should not devalue because if we do the poor people would suffer.
“…People that were profiting from this were the ones telling the government that if you devalue people would suffer; meanwhile they all got the dollar at N197 and price their goods at N300.
“The poor paid the price of the devalued currency and the rich schemed up the profits and it went on for one year and we talked and talked and talked. “If the present administration continues to behave the way the immediate past government behaved, we will end up where Jonathan ended. You may not like it but that is the truth.”
He added that one needs not be an economist to know that any system that allows someone to make N1bn profit through a phone call without investing a kobo is a wrong system and unsustainable.
He pointed out that the economics aspect of the whole thing was that for every one billion dollars that was taken from the federation account and sold by the CBN at N197, the states were losing N100bn that can go into salaries, into agriculture and into healthcare.
