By Omodele Adigun
As President Bola Tinubu, vowed to ensure that investors and foreign businesses repatriate their dividends and profits home”, his government has been urged to leverage the RT200 policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and embark on massive export drive to earn more foreign exchange (forex).
Recently, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) reported that foreign airlines’ blocked funds in Nigeria, had hit $812.2 million, making the country the highest defaulter globally.
The trapped funds worldwide were estimated at $2.27 billion as of last April. As if that was not enough, the Chief Executive Officer of The Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX), Temi Popoola, lamented that the NGX trades between $250 million to $300 million a day and added that this has declined owing to forex constraints.
“We are hopeful and we are beginning to see that the new administration wants to tackle the forex constraints”, he said.
President Tinubu, in his inaugural speech, said, “I have a message for our investors, local and foreign: our government shall review all their complaints about multiple taxation and various anti-investment inhibitions. We shall ensure that investors and foreign businesses repatriate their hard earned dividends and profits home.”
For Nigeria to live up to this, a financial analyst, Marcel Okeke, a former Chief Economist at Zenith Bank, advised the new government of Tinubu to embark on massive export drive to e earn huge forex that will cater for its needs.
In a phone chat in Lagos with Daily Sun, Okeke said the government should take a cue from the RT 200 of the CBN.
“The CBN is doing a great job. In fact, if the RT200 had been on in the past eight years, Nigeria won’t be in this forex scarcity mess of today. So, going forward, the RT200 initiative should be further improved and fortified, so that exporters of non-oil items are not only encouraged, but properly incentivised to repatriate their earnings promptly. All the unnecessary red tapes and bottlenecks at the ports and export agencies must be minimised or removed completely.
The export drive must be accompanied with reorientation to consume home made goods and services. Not mere propaganda or sloganeering. Nigeria must reverse very high import-dependency and rabid taste for everything foreign. There are more but these should be part of the roadmap for our economic recovery and development.”
On the forex volume to target, Okeke posited that the amount is indeterminate, because of the level of corruption in the land. Also, our economy is so much import-dependent.
Most Nigerians have a taste for foreign things; and so, we need massive export drive and reorientation to consume “made in Nigeria” goods and services. These are some of the ways to grow/improve the economy.”
On the airlines’ trapped funds in Nigeria, he lamented that this shows the whole world that the country is in crisis.
According to him, “When companies make money here (profit or dividends) and can’t take them home (back to their headquarters) because Nigeria does not have enough dollars for them to repatriate; this tells the whole world that Nigeria is in a fiscal mess. Acute shortage of foreign exchange is the matter.