…Says it fails to implement right policies
The immediate-past Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, says Nigeria is in a far worse economic mess today because it failed to implement the right policies.
The former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN), who stated this in an interview said that instead the country has, like one in a hole, kept digging and digging into a deeper hole.
Sanusi also said Nigeria’s economy would, by 2023 have been dragged back 40 years to the low point it was in 1980, wiping out all the gains secured in the 35 years before 2015.
His words: “We had decisions that should have been taken in 2015 and 2016. To me, this is why I am not too sympathetic to the administration.
“The problems we have were all foreseen. Every economist would have told you that this is where we were going to end up with the exchange rate, this is where we were going to end up with inflation, with the fiscal position of the government if we fail to implement the right policies.
Sanusi Lamido further said, “When we talk about huge devaluations and high rates of inflation and low rate of GDP growth and excessive rate of population growth, all of these factors come into that number because if your population is growing faster than your GDP, your per capita income goes down anyway even if nothing happens to inflation and exchange rates.
“Now when you compound that with high rates of inflation and devaluation, then on a dollar basis, the rate of our collapse is huge; and that is what we have had in the last five years”.
Sanusi said he felt sorry for both the present CBN governor and the finance minister, saying, “At the end of the day, you need to implement the right policies. I think we need debt relief, we need to do the belt-tightening and we need to send out the right signals”.
