Stop advising Nigeria to devalue Naira, SAN warns IMF

A Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Yunus Ustaz Usman, has warned the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to stop misadvising Nigeria to further devalue its naira.

“I have been studying calls by the international community for Nigeria to further devalue its Naira,” he said.

Reacting to the devaluation calls by the international community as reported in a national daily, Usman stated that such calls are aimed at ensuring that foreign partners pay peanut for Nigeria’s oil and other goods and services while Nigeria pays through its nose to buy theirs at all times. “It is just to ensure that we remain permanently economic slaves to the western world,” he stressed.

Stating the reasons why Nigeria should revalue its naira upwards rather than devalue it, he said: “When all we had were unprocessed groundnuts, unprocessed cocoa and unprocessed palm oil, N1, 000 exchanged for €777.77 in 1982 as shown in my wife’s estacode in her passport where she bought $666.00 for N500 in 1983) but now that Nigeria is number six world largest oil producing country, why should $1 buy our Naira for N161? “Why should £1 sell for N265? What economic sense is in that? Our foreign reserve is not low and General Sani Abacha fixed $1 to N80 for 8 years and it was smooth and stable,” he recalled.

According to him, the only logical conclusion is that “some Nigerians who had stock piled too much foreign currencies would want continuous devaluation of the Naira so that they can continue to exchange little foreign currencies at their disposal for a lot of Naira.”