FOREX: Agric exporters ready for litigation- FACAN President

Dr. Victor Iyama

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) policy of Foreign Exchange (FOREX) market initiated by its Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele has again received another attack from the President of Federation of Agricultural Commodities of Nigeria (FACAN) Dr. Victor Iyama who had severally said the policy was rather retrogressive to the development of agriculture in terms of market frontier expansion and revenue generation saying they will not hesitate to take legal action if the policy is not revised to Prof. Soludo’s policy of 2006. 

Dr. Iyama pointed that agricultural produce exporters are presently going through a hard time occasioned by policy summersault selfishly created by the present CBN Governor for the benefit of his bank and others lamenting on why government should compulsory direct exporters to be selling their hard earn dollars at the government official rate that they are not getting to buy at official rate.

He stressed the need to revise this policy back to Prof. Charles Soludo policy as adopted during President Obasanjo’s era saying this was why many Nigerians are always agitated whenever a banker is made the Governor of CBN stressing former CBN Governor was able to understand exporters’ plight based on his neutral position on the issue. 

FACAN President speaking to pressmen said that “during the time of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, he allowed agricultural exporters to sell their produce with direct access to FOREX and this policy helped the revenue generation soared from 700 million dollars to almost 4 billion dollars. But this revenue has gone down now as the reason is simple. 

This is because you are asking the exporters to buy their produce at black market rate and then sell to the banks at the official rate. This is cheating when you look at it from the angle of buying produce from farmers. No farmer will want to sell his or produce at lower rate to market exchange rate. What the farmer knows is that the exchange rate is N320.00-N310.00 be it cocoa, sesame and ginger. 

The question is” are the banks selling to exporters at N199.00? they too end up selling at N310.00 to N320.00 thereby reaping off the exporters and farmers their sweat and work. That is the pain of exporter today and that is why non-oil sector is going down now every day. We have been talking to them that this policy will kill export as we have written without any response till now. 

The CBN should go back to Prof. Soludo policy of 2006. This sudden change of this policy by the present CBN government is killing the sub sector as he has compulsorily directed that exporters will no longer have access to their money and they must sell to the banks which has contravened the march 2006 policy by President Obasanjo and Prof. Soludo.

 Exporters must have access to their account and they must be freed to use it by way of selling it to whoever that wants to buy from them. We have been crying since last year that this policy is counter productive, and if this policy is not revised we shall have no option than to take legal action”