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The Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Dr Kingsley Obiora, has revealed how Nigeria came out of the recession that plagued countries of the world in 2020.
He also revealed what the CBN is doing concerning high exchange rate as well as the various ways it is empowering Nigerians and taking them out of poverty.
Dr. Obiora spoke while appearing on a programme, Metaverse With Black Mentors.
The Metaverse with black mentor is a programme that celebrates people of excellence and who have shaped the entire world with their ideas, policies and success story.
Speaking on his career journey, Dr Kingsley Obiora, said his background in economic has made him remain committed in ensuring good policies for the growth of the country.
“I started my career at the University of Benin where I studied Economics with and statistics with the combination with Education.”
He graduated top of the class and did both masters and PHD in same institution.
He later joined the West African Monetry Institute in Accra, Ghana and later joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a staff economist in 2007.
He later rose to the board of IMF and in March of 2020, he was appointed the Deputy Governor of CBN.
“Its been economics all my life and I am just trying to make sure that all the policies put in place make the lives of ordinary people better.”
He said one of his motivating factor is “Never thinking that success is a destination but that success is a journey. So stay hungry and make sure that the journey is continuing.”
“You are only as good as your last product. Its important to stay hungry; you must be better at what you do. Keep learning new things and you will be relevant.”
Speaking on the machinery put in place by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) towards empowering Nigerian youths, he said the apex bank has provided loans and many skill acquisition programmes that have empowered thousands of youths in Nigeria.
“The CBN has an Act which promotes sound financial system and issue local currencie and make sure the currency is strong.
“We have a dual mandate role that create programmes and initiatives to help Nigerian youths.
He said the CBN governor’s main focus is on youth and economic growth.
The governor,” Godwin Emefiele has developed what we call the Enterprise Development Centre. We have put six of them in all the geopolitical zones.”
“Each of these centres is basically to ensure that we develop some certain skills for the purpose of job creation for out youths.”
“Since 2008, we have grown the number of trainees from just 2915 in 2008 to almost 83,000 in 2021. What we do is that we train them in the skills that they want and provide loans at very low interest rates that can help them go and start doing the skill they learnt.”
“We have disbursed about 3.9 billion to the trainees and created about 37, 000 jobs across these geopolitical zones.”
He said Emefiele “tweaked the enterprise development programme into vocational Entrepreneurship programmes which have trained over 3000 students.”
He said another initiative by the CBN to empower the youths is the Creative Industry Financing Initiative” which covers music, movies fashion, IT that youths like.“
“We have given loans to 372 entreprenuers totaling about 3.4 billion naira. We also have one that the governor championed not too long ago called the Tertiary Intitution Entreprenuership Scheme in 2021” partnering with Nigerian universities and polytechnics to train graduates in entrepresnuership schemes and so far, the scheme has disbursed loans to 59 graduate totaling about 294 million naira as of date.”
These interventions are geared to help the Nigerian youths with skills that make them job creators instead of being job seekers.
On the eNaira:
The Deputy Governor said the misconception about the eNaira is a result of curiosity, that people don’t know much about the digital currency.
“It’s a new product. Digital currencies are things that in the last five years just exploded, especially COMING OUT OF THE GLOBAL FINANCE CRISIS that we saw recently.
He said many people don’t trust central institutions issuing digital currencies that might become worthless due to hyper inflation.
However, he assuaded the fears of people saying in the history of the world, only Venezuela and Zimbabwe have ever experienced hyperinflation.
The eNaira is a class of currency called CBN’s digital currency which is an electronic form of the normal cash held by people.
The CBN eNaira uses blockchain technology but issued by CBN.
“It removes middlemen from your transactions. With a digital currency like the eNaira, there are no intermediaries.”
“Nigeria is among the top five in the world with best payment infrastructure.”
He said the CBN governor had promised Nigerians this and has delivered even with the eNaira.
“We have managed to be the first country in Africa to introduce digital currency. And third in the world. “
He said the CBN is not only trying to follow trends but to lead the trends, hence the launch of the eNaira.
He said as people use it more and understand the eNaira more, the curiosity will end.
He said Nigerian youths can tap into the eNaira infrastructure to build apps to trade internationally.
On Recession:
He said recession is when you have two negative growth rate following each other.
“We did suffer a recession in 2020 where in quarter 2 we shrank and in quarter 3, we shrank. Every country in the world suffered a recession, or at least 95 per cent did suffered. “
He said because of the policies put in place by the CBN governor, Nigeria was able to come out of the recession at the fourth quarter of 2020.
How said a country escapes a recession when after two or three quarters of contraption, it shows a GDP growth that is positive.
“Anybody that tells you that we are in a recession is absolutely wrong.”
He said this is because Nigeria was out of the recession in the fourth quarter of 2021.
He said Nigeria is working hard to be far away from recession and that policies have been put in place to ensure this.
He said increase in consumption and increased investment are part of the strategies to keep Nigeria far away from recession.
What we did to get out of Covid:
“We created what we called the Targeted Credit Facility” were we gave almost 400b directly to people affected by Covid.”
The CBN is boosting the country’s economy by launching programmes like the “Targeted Credit Facility”that focuses on giving money to hundreds of thousands of people who were affected by Covid.
He said the CBN has disbursed over 400 billion directly to people affected by Covid.
“we reduced the interest rates from 9 to 5 percent. We created a 1tr fund for manufacturers and we created a health fund for Nigerian businesses to go into healthcatre services.”
He said the CBN took this decition because many countrys refused to export their health fascilities to Nigeria during Covid so CBN wanted Nigeria the be self-sufficient hence, the programmes.
He said the CBN is also ensuring to assure people keep investing and making profit in Nigeria.
Where shoud Nigerians invest to gain financial freedom:
Nigerian economy is in two sectors; oil and non oil sectors.
He said 90% of Nigeria’s GDP growth comes from the non-oil which he said contributes more.
He listed non-oil viable sectors such as “Agriculture, manufacturing, creative industry, e-commerce, construction and real estate.”
He urged Nigerians to invest in businesses that were not affected by Covid.
They should look into those that benefitted from Covid, like IT and delivery services, food processing, retail, ecommerce, agriculture, and so on.
He said Aviation, tourism; leisure might not be the best sectors to invest right now.
On Exchange Rate:
He said the price of anything in the market is determined by supply and demand. If it has high demand, the price will go high and vice versa.
So, according to him, the exchange rate is high because Dollar supply or availability has stopped
“The productive base that used to bring in dollar into the country has dropped significantly over years.”
He said the drop has been occurring for a long time now. The demand for dollar is high because people are sending their children abroad for education and need dollars to finance them why the supply of dollar has dropped.
He said Rice, palm oil and fish were consuming over a billion dollar yearly from CBN so, the CBN stopped their importation and focused on local production of these products.
13 pyramids of 998,000 bags of locally produced Nigerian rice were recently launched by the CBN.
He said Nigeria also reduced over dependence on importation of palm oil and cement.
We have self sufficiency of cement in this country today.
He said with all these initiatives, the exchange rate will soon come down.
Dr. Obiora said Nigeria’s future is bright. He also urged Nigerians, however, to keep hope alive and look for things to contribute to make the country better.
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