NIGERIANS importing fowl legs, fowl heads, and fish heads should halt it. Why do we keep proving to the Caucasians that truly we are hewers of wood and drawers of water; and rejectable foods abroad are our own delicacies? What an ugly paradigm in dishing the meal!
The government agency responsible for food control and administration, NAFDAC, precisely should step in immediately by confiscating any container on the creek that carries above-mentioned junks. Let’s prove the white men wrong that we are not animals, that in truth, we are well-blooded human beings who deserve to eat healthy, nutritious, and modestly proteinous foods as they do. They should stop cartonising heads of seafood to us in Nigeria and, by extension, the rest countries in the dark continent.
Meanwhile, the administration of President Tinubu must make life more bearable for the citizens by way of instituting synthetic parity between earned income, and its power of purchasing qualitative food items, medicaments, electricity, utensils; and in cost of interstate transportation.It should as well facilitate synthesis in policy formulation so as to create growth for small and medium businesses.
The elixir to engender the suggestive parity is, unarguably, to strengthen the local currency; it is downright pertinent to jettison the float agenda recommended by the World Bank. Kowtowing the CBN governor sincerely, the Naira is grossly undervalued. In fact, its chequered depreciation does not tally with the 3.1 percent growth recorded in H1 of year 2024. In the macroeconomy, if there was a balance trade, the corollary effect is to appreciate, not depreciate, the local currency. If also, there are inflows of foreign currency through investments and foreign loans as Tinubu’s administration prides itself, the Naira ought not to remain battered.
In a matter of fact, the smudge on the lull in oil industry shouldn’t be at the doorpost of Dangote Refinery and Independent Petroleum Marketers; the causal arrow, the bulwark for such lull, points in the direction of gross currency devaluation, inasmuch as they (IPMAN & Dangote) source their hard currency requirement from foreign exchange market, not directly from the apex bank at official rate. The unwholesome derivative effect of this practice is what we face today in the oil sector; extensively on the prodigious scale, it occasions the hardship in the society.
It is laudable to see over 133 percent increase in national minimum wage; but throwing forensic anatomy in the works, sharp increase in commodity price index (CPI), consequential from the conducted anatomy, dovetails the relief to naught. What the government gives to workers through the right hand is taken back with the left hand. Tinubu just has to adorn the garb of political will to format the economy. The epistemology of selling hard currency to upscale fiscal revenue needs to be reviewed; it is dystopian. The sophistication is to compositely heighten productivity. Nigeria should additionally exploit her latent organic gold that includes bitumen, felspar, columbite, tar-sand, raw gold, kaolin, clay, etc, to supplement the black gold (crude oil.)
Telling Nigerians the gospel truth is, the brass hats our Ibadan protesters are yearning for, have no solution to the hardship; not mincing words, they would excruciate it. Therefore, the patient, which is considered as the hard lesson learned in calibrating a distortion, is key towards relief. Military incursion is certainly not the best alternative.
Format the economy as prescribed above to see whether Messrs. White won’t ferry their fish and fowl heads to other countries aside from Nigeria.
Folorunsho Bello, a Certified Public Accountant, is also a Distinguished Professor of Financial Management at Pebble Hills University Delaware, USA.
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