The Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi ll, has said the Nigerian government has been creating billionaires through the practice of selling dollars to businessmen at official rate.
The Emir who noted that such businessmen go ahead to resell at a higher rate at the parallel market said: “We have created our own billionaires since 2015 from foreign exchange subsidy.”
Emir Sanusi made this disclosure during his speech at the 15th Joint National Council on Development Planning meeting held in Kano yesterday.
In the speech titled: “Nigeria: The search for new growth model,” the emir noted that the businessmen buy the dollar at N197 and price their goods at N300.
“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.”
The Emir, in his speech, while faulting the economic policy which supports the practice and the major implications explained 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.
He further questioned the policy which allows one person make as much as N1billion profit through a phone call without investment.
“What kind of economy are we running? Who is advising the government? I want know who is advising the government so that I can talk to the adviser.
“We didn’t have money, oil price has collapsed, avengers were blowing oil wells and the scarce dollars we had we are selling cheaply to some few individuals.”