Expert demands consumption of locally produced goods

A resource management expert at the Lagos Business School, Dr Austin Nweze, has called on the federal government to look inward to solve the consistent fall in the value of naira against the United States dollar.

In a chat with our Correspondent, Dr Nweze, said the government need to introduce short, medium and long-term strategy to solve the foreign exchange crisis

According to him, Nigeria must ensure 80 percent of goods consumed in the country must be locally produced.

It could be recalled that, on Wednesday, the naira depreciated against the United States dollar as it trades N951.22/$1 against N806.73/$1 it traded, on Tuesday, at the Nigerian Autonomous Foreign Exchange Market (NAFEM), the country’s official exchange rate window.

According to Data from FMDQ Securities Exchange, a platform that oversees foreign exchange (FX) trading in Nigeria, the market recorded an N1159.10 high spot rate and N701.00 low.
Nweze who is also a lecturer at the Pan Atlantic University, Lagos, however, reiterated that the country must move away from consumption to a producing economy.

“What the government needs to do is to have a national strategy which should be a short, medium and long-term strategy. What we need is more production and there should be a strategy for producing.

When the CBN was defending the naira, they were just throwing money into problems and no one do that. We shouldn’t throw money to the problem but we need to think. The biggest way out is domestic production because Nigeria’s Economy is more about consumption and we must produce what we consume because until we begin to consume what we produce by 80 percent, there may not be a way forward.

“If we want to produce, we must find a better way of doing it both in the value chain. If we require a machine, we must produce that machine locally and not import from China. If the government can listen, the way to build the economy is to have raw material base and once we do that, we move to industrialization not just being able to import the component, whatever we plan to produce, 80 percent of the component must be produced in Nigeria,” he stated.

He also disclosed that the the country must stop borrowing to consume and we must prioritize local production of goods and machinery used for production.

“So, we need to stop borrowing money to consume. The economy is bleeding, the amount used to buy cars have created jobs for the people in the country we bought them for. Anything that we consume that is not produced locally, we are running down our economy and helping that economy to grow. We need to turn around and look inward,” he stated.