NEWS: FG MUST RE-PRIOTIZE PUBLIC SPENDING TOWARDS INVESTMENT IN HUMAN CAPITAL.... SANUSI LAMIDO SANUSI

HRH, EMIR OF KANO

President Muhammadu Buhari is certainly not getting the right support as more prominent Nigerians have continued to lend their voices to the call for caution in the handling of the nation’s resources following the biting economic conditions being faced by the people.

Adding his voice to calls on the President, immediate past Governor of the CBN and now the current Emir of Kano, Alhaji Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, has warned President Muhammadu Buhari not to allow his administration be lead into creating what he described as "forex billionaires", asking the President not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors.

The present economic quagmire that the country has currently found itself was not accidental, but a consequence of poor management, adding that meaningful development cannot be engendered if the country doesn’t eschew the habit of borrowing to pay salaries and service recurrent expenditures, Emir Sanusi said.

He therefore called on President Buhari not to toe the path of the Goodluck Jonathan administration by embarking on Forex Subsidies.

“We created billionaires from Oil Subsidies in the past. We are making the same mistake with Forex Subsidy,” Sanusi said, in apparent reference to the dual exchange rates currently operational at the CBN.

“As an Emir, I can seat in my garden and make phone calls to access $10 million at N197/$ and then sell it off at nothing less than N300 and any such system is a wrong system,” he said.

The Emir of Kano made this known while speaking at the 15th Joint Planning Board and National Council of Development Planning Matters in Kano State, blamed the present recession bedeviling the country on the inability to diversify the economy.

An inability caused in part by the subsidy regime which, according to him, “empowers a small group of criminals rather than the poor masses it was meant for”.

The former CBN Governor however called on the Federal Government to eliminate “wasteful and abuse-prone subsidies. If you must subsidize anything, please it should be for production rather than consumption”.

Stressing that the FG must set Forex rates to incentivize capital inflows and catalyze Foreign Direct Investment, as well as protect labour intensive manufacturing industries, and increase capital expenditure, the Emir, however, sees light at the end of the tunnel for Nigeria.