- Says The Economy Will Only Recover, When Nigeria Moves From Consumption To Production
Abia State Governor, Alex Otti, has blamed the Federal Government of Nigeria for the free fall of the Nigerian currency, the naira, by printing too much money into circulation.
This is even as he blamed the leaders of the country for lacking financial discipline.
The governor made these accusations during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Thursday.
“I believe that the major problem we have is financial discipline. We are dealing with an economy where we printed so much money, at the last count, we will be nearing N30 trillion,” he said.
“So, what happens with ways and means is that the quantum of goods that you have available in an economy does not increase with the quantity of money that you print.”
During the interview, the governor, who is a member of the Labour Party (LP), said the nation must move from consumption to production for the economy to recover.
He condemned the situation whereby Africa’s largest economy imports virtually every product, saying it piles much pressure on the foreign market.
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“The issue of production versus consumption, if the economy must recover, we must move to production.
“That does not necessarily mean we will reduce consumption; what it means is that we will be consuming what we produce, to the extent that we are importing virtually everything. You keep piling pressure on the foreign exchange market,” he said.
Meanwhile, Otti explained that a number of things contributed to the delay of the 181-megawatt geometric power plant in the Aba area of the state.
The project was started in 2004 during the administration of Governor Orji Uzor Kalu but was only completed a few days ago.
Giving a background to the delay in the project, Otti, a former bank chief, said sometimes in 2010, the founder of Geometrics Power Limited and ex-Minister for Science and Technology, Bart Nnaji approached him as an Executive Director of First Bank to appeal that the former bank that was funding the project had stopped it mid-way owing to the global economic crisis.
He said, “We processed an $85m facility for him (Nnaji) but unfortunately, he couldn’t draw down on that facility because the board of the bank felt that because I was proceeding to Diamond Bank as CEO, it won’t make any sense to allow the country to withdraw the facility when the person that was going to manage it was not there.
“I headed to Diamond Bank which actually was the bank that was initially funding the project. On getting to Diamond Bank, we restructured the facility and saw it to completion by October 2014, the time I left Diamond Bank.
“But a lot of things happened thereafter that made it impossible for the project to take off. There was the unfortunate sale and resale of the Aba Invest Island and that took a life of its own.
“When that was resolves, Shell which owned the major oil block that was supposed to supply gas to Geometric has sold it to another company whose focus was not gas for domestic use but export
“By the time we took over on the 29th of May, we sat down with Geometric a few times and engaged with NNPC and NNPC deployed their partners and gas was made available.”
The governor said the plant currently supply 141 megawatts power, the capacity at this time, is expandable to 181 megawatts when the final turbine is delivered.
According to him, the third turbine of the plant has been fired and all the three turbines are operational and “power outage will the exception rather than the rule which is the situation at this time”.
