Fayose Tells Buhari, You Have Already Devalued The Naira

Fayose’s assertion was contained in a statement issued by his special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media to the governor, Lere Olayinka, in Ado-Ekiti.

According to the Governor, with the huge gap between the official rate and the open market rate, the naira has already been devalued.

He said: “With the gap between the official rate of N199 and open market rate of over N400 to one dollar, naira has already been devalued.

“Therefore, President Muhammadu Buhari must stop deceiving himself and shortchanging Nigerians, especially states and local councils in the country with his Forex Policy.”

Governor Fayose lamented that there was no time in the history of Nigeria that the gap between dollar official rate and open market rate was more than N200.

He further pointed out that it made no economic sense for the Federal Government to be calculating the country’s revenue on the basis of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) official rate of N199 to a dollar while States and Local Councils that are sharing the revenue with the Federal Government run their businesses at the open market rate of over N400 to one dollar, thereby causing business to be folding up by the day and prices of goods skyrocketing every day.

Fayose urged the President to pay more attention to the ailing economy of the country instead of engaging in his foreign trips, wasting $1 million per foreign trip.

He said, “President Buhari has travelled to 24 countries in eight months, and will be spending 16 out of the 29 days in February outside the country, with over $500,000 being spent on estacode while the Presidential Air Fleet, which includes fueling of the planes and allowances for crew members is said to be in the range of $500,000.

“The President’s entourage obviously collect their travel allowances in dollars on official rate of N199 and come back to Nigeria to change it at the open market rate of N400. That must be the reason they encourage the President to be junketing abroad when life is becoming unbearable for Nigerians.

“The situation is such that Nigeria gets say $2 billion revenue in a month, calculates the $2 billion revenue on the basis of the official CBN rate of N199 and share the revenue among the three tiers of government.

“In elementary economics, the implication is that when revenue is calculated based on N199 to one dollar and the federal government will be declaring say revenue of N400 billion to be shared by the three tiers of government, the value of revenue that should have been shared will be over N800 billion at the open market rate of N400 to one dollar.

“Meanwhile, the three tiers of government pay salaries to workers on the basis of N199 per dollar while the workers pay for goods and services which prices are determined by the open market rate of N400 to one dollar.

“Also, Nigeria is now faced with a situation whereby funds are obtained from the official forex market (at lower rates) and diverted to other markets and sold at a higher rate by forex dealing banks and users, who make billions of naira profit just for doing almost nothing.”