What we spend our dollars on in Nigeria

Ordinarily, naira is the official currency of Nigeria but for so many years now, the dollar has become more popular than the naira in the domestic economy.

Ordinarily, naira is the official currency of Nigeria but for so many years now, the dollar has become more popular than the naira in the domestic economy. It is the currency of the opulent, the very rich who take pride in cultures outside their shores. Our leaders deal in dollars, in politics they spend dollars, at parties they spend it. They use it to bribe the electorates. When former President Muhammadu Buhari asked Godwin Emefiele, CBN governor, now in President Bola Tinubu's detention to make sure that the naira was not in circulation so that Tinubu, especially, and his other co-travellers will not have any money to buy votes, they showed Buhari that he can never get them. They got into their vaults and brought our dollars. Buhari himself spent dollars and may still be spending it. His media adviser, Femi Adesina told Nigerians that Buhari gifted him dollars as he went for a conference in China. I wonder where he got it.

But there is a peculiar way the poor have also joined in the spending of dollars in Nigeria. I'm very sure the poor don't know they spend dollars. They will be surprised if they are told, but they do. The champion of the movement of Nigeria from "consumption to production," Mr. Gregory Peter Obi, Labour Party's presidential candidate in the 2023 elections played a very big role in training the poor to spend dollars. I think having done this so much and having made so much money from it and seeing the plight of poor Nigerians as a result of it, Obi repented and decided to undo what he helped did. Obi is part of the rentier class in Nigeria, the class that made money without doing anything. Obi will deny this, after all he has been very hardworking and travelling across nations and importing goods which are immediately gobbled up, and which attends to the needs of Nigerians. But he was helping to encourage conspicuous consumption.

Obi was so successful in this international junketing that he reportedly stacked huge sums of money in Virgin Island using shell companies to shield his money away from the prying eyes of Nigeria’s tax officials. Honestly, the poor of Nigeria did not know Obi could have been behind their woes. Obi is their friend who imported goods that they buy with their naira. Obi was doing a clean business helping the poor to also have a taste of foreign products. But now dollars are in short supply. Tinubu said he was floating the naira and the poor just saw that the prices of goods Obi had helped import was gradually getting beyond what they could afford and in some instances no longer available in the market. They asked and they were told the dollars Obi and co was using to buy goods before now is costing so much in naira terms. A dollar now exchanges for about one thousand naira.

So the poor are realizing that when they switched from the culture of broom sticks to the culture of toothpicks which was not used by their forefathers but which Obi and fellow importers of foreign goods taught, they were spending dollars and doing damage to the naira. With every toothpick they use, though their poor neighbors saw them as sophisticated, what they were doing is literally eat away at their dollars, contributing to the calamity of the naira. Electricity is a rarity in their nation, they know that. They know that their government has been very sloopy at that, that many of those who rule them made fortunes from many electricity contracts without getting even a wattage of electricity out. They grew up to see their fathers and mothers use hurricane or earthen lantern but in their own generation, electricity generators, ranging from the very big ones sold by Lebanese who front for highly placed civil servants and politicians, and the very small ones that the poor can afford called 'I better pass my neighbor.' "I better pass my neighbor" became a showy item for the poor to tell his neighbor that his poverty is better than his neighbours’. Though the carbon monoxide it emits has sent many to their graves, it is being used up till now that the naira floating policy of Tinubu has sent its price beyond the poor. While it was being sold, it helped deplete Nigeria's dollar reserve.

And then there are lamps, battery-powered inverters, electric irons, power banks, chargers, electric bulbs, extension sockets, touch lights, plastic spoons, Italian shoes, takeaway plastics plates etc that used to be manufactured locally but now imported from China. Android phones could be made here but they are imported. We love ankara fabrics, especially the Yoruba. The Igbo call it 'na you biko,’ the Hausa and Fulani don't joke with their guinea brocade. We used to have many textile mills in Kaduna, Lagos, and Ibadan. In some nations of Africa people will not buy ankara fabrics except 'made in Nigeria' is inscribed on it. But when they stopped coming from Nigeria’s texile mills, those texile companies in cahoots with their governments began to print 'made in Nigeria' on their locally made fabrics and the people were buying, and thinking they are from Nigeria. But Nigerians killed their own texile mills because they stopped to grow cottons in the north, because they won't work to fix electricity supply, because rather than do all these, the importers are feeding fat by feeding the poor with a taste for foreign made fabrics.

Adire, a local fabric has been in Abeokuta, Ogun State for ages. Those hard-working women perfected the art before the Whiteman set his deceptive foot on Nigeria’s soil. But leaders in Nigeria allowed things to go on as it had been since days gone by. They did not help modernize the production of adire. And so China came, studied the technology and went back to produce it in large quantities which means at lower cost than those of the women who produced theirs with low technology. And so the poor buy the China brand of adire thinking they are still buying the local ones. Result is we spend dollars on that which we used to spend naira on. Now local adire is on its way out. The poor won't miss adire because wise China has given them an alternative and changed their taste. For this reason, our dollar will continue to be misspent on foreign goods.

Charles Soludo, Anambra State governor and an economist saw the situation and swore he will wear Akwete, the local fabric for which Ndigbo is well known. Let's hope that Ndigbo will copy Soludo and wear Akwete so that we will stop spending our dollars on foreign fabrics. Let's hope also that China is not already on the prowl again producing China Akwete. And if they do, let's hope that Tinubu will slam a ban on it. Obi is always a very shrewd spender. He would not waste his hard-earned dollars. He wears very simple locally sewn cloths. I don't know how much impact he made on Nigerians. I don't know if they caught the message he was and still passing around that it is patriotic and economical to wear what you have and which is yours. It grows the economy and strengthens the naira and conserves dollars.

Nigerians like to wear suits even when the atmosphere is ovenhot for no comfortable reason other than it is the whiteman's cloth and it is more ego-boosting to appear like the Whiteman. Even the north that used to be comfortable in their agbada are now wearing suits. When we wear suits we spend our dollars on what is not comfortable but expensive and wasteful of the dollars and helps the whiteman to have an edge over us in international trade. I see our youths making some advances as they create fashion out of the simple wears, but I think, still, Tinubu needs Peter Obi. He should ask Obi to introduce his tailor to him so that he can begin to dress like Obi. He will thus encourage Nigerians to wear and be proud of made-in-Nigeria apparel. Mr. President, forget that Peter Obi is in court contending your election, do the vital things of dressing simply like Obi; forget your Lagos tailors who are sowing those large and flowing agbada and dandogo made from imported guinea brocade for you. Wear made-in-Nigeria and conserve our foreign reserves.

Mr. President, thanks to those Havard and Yale trained economists and financial gurus around you, but getting the naira to rise and become equal to the dollar as it was some decades ago is not a matter of floating of the naira, rather it is a matter of producing for export so that you may get more dollars, and a matter of self-reliance for what we need at home. The acting CBN governor is saying there are still two exchange rate markets, the official window and the parallel market. I thought you killed the black market when you floated the naira. Like a good fighter that it is, corruption has gotten back into our exchange rate regime and the only thing that will correct that is to tame what Nigerians spend our dollars on.

Self-reliance is key to economic progress. The starting point should be our apparel. So, when President Tinubu begins to wear made-in-Nigeria clothes, his jumbo-sized 70-man cabinet will join him, the 36 governors and their commissioners will join and you can be sure the 774 local government chairmen and their councillors will follow suit because Nigerians are good at jumping on the bandwagon which, of course, will be a war on the dollar which will forcefully conserve it and raise the value of the now battered naira.

Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos