The Word On The Streets XV: The Foreign Currency Edition
If you’re not hip to TWOTS, you can run through past editions here. Your correspondent flew under the radar for 4 days in Lagos last week. Here’s what I saw[…]
Category: Analysis
Nigeria: On The Little Matter Of The Economy
In spite of visceral antipathy to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the country, the Fund has only ever advised governments here. Mid-1980s, in the aftermath of the ballyhooed debate[…]
Of Lies and the National Character
Of late, I have made much on my social media posts of the minister of state for petroleum’s fib. He had a couple of weeks back promised the country respite[…]
Can We Be A Democracy With A Closed Economy?
As the domestic economy continues to tread water, our talking heads find themselves preoccupied; both with the intensity of the new narratives; and because of the variety of panaceas on[…]
Swap It, Don’t Break It – Feyi Fawehinmi
Imagine you are China. You sell a lot of stuff to the world. In fact, your whole economy is based on selling things to the world. You have an incentive[…]
Ajaokuta — The Beginning
As you’ve probably seen in the news, steelmaking in Britain is facing an existential crisis. After losing about £5bn in total, TATA are understandably fed up and have now thrown[…]
Thoughts of a “Tanker Chaser”
After spending three hours on a fuel queue on Sunday, at the end of which I bought fuel at N150 a litre, I could not but reflect on two phases[…]
Taming the New Inflation
“Surprise” was the most popular verb associated by most commentators with the outcome of last week’s meeting of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) — its[…]
Inflation, Monetary Policy, and Poverty
At the height of the arguments around the pros and cons of a naira devaluation, President Buhari had argued that he needed to be convinced of the utility of the[…]
NNPC: The Pendulum Swings Again
First a bit of brief history. Oil was discovered in Nigeria in 1908 but actual production in commercial quantities only started in 1957. In 1959 the federal government (more like[…]