The Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Confederated Facilitators Limited (CFL) Group of Companies, Engr. Lai Omotola, has identified business cabals as those holding Nigeria down, saying that the so-called business elite possessed a reversed mentality of what business is all about.
Omotola stated this at a news conference marking CFL Group’s 25 years of doing business in Nigeria, which took place in his Maryland office in Lagos, saying that he had never seen elite business people whose only business was speculating on the nation’s currency.
This was just as he decried the state of the naira, saying that it was made worse by the business cabal, whose sole business was to speculate on how to make a huge profit as long as the dollar gained an extreme advantage over the local currency.
“The problem we have in Nigeria is the so-called business elites, who have little understanding of the game called business. They have a reversed mentality of what business is all about,” he said.
The CFL boss recalled that former President Mohammadu Buhari’s government spent a sum of N1.7 trillion on agriculture but lamented that a bag of rice was still selling between N45,000 and N60,000 in Nigeria, declaring that the blame for the sad development should be laid at the doorstep of the businessmen.
“This was not Buhari’s fault, but that of the businessmen. They collected the money, lied to the government that they had 50 hectares of land somewhere, and diverted the money. When it is time for harvest, they will hire people to cause a crisis in the community and declare force majeure,” he said.
Omotola, while decrying the state of the naira, said it was made worse by the business cabal, whose sole business was to speculate on how to make a huge profit, noting that a manufacturing plant may need just $1 million but would claim it needs $10 million.
He said that the truth of the matter was that nobody was investigating if the actual need of the plant was $10 million or if it needed something less than what it actually demanded.
According to him, the plant most likely only needed $1 million but would collect $10 million, adding that it would send the $1 million to its supplier, convert the remaining $9 million to Naira, and sell it to black marketers.
“When you have a gap of over N300 in the exchange rate and you are selling $9 million, you are making N270 million without having a staff or investing anywhere, but just taking dollars in and out, and that is why the Naira today is moving towards N1,200 for a dollar,” he said.
The CFL boss, while acknowledging the fact that the economy in most countries is powered by market forces, sadly noted that there was nothing called market forces in Nigeria’s economy.
He argued that Nigeria’s economy is rather powered by market cabals, saying that regulating the currency had moved from the hands of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to the hands of the market cabals.
“Let me tell you how they operate. For instance, they know that Nigeria requires $100 million to have that floating that will keep the difference between the official rate and parallel market at N2. And the cabals are the ones that have $100 million. So they will only release $50 million into the economy.
“Now, when you release $50 million, demand for the dollar will become much higher and supply will become lower, thereby influencing and increasing the dollar price to Naira. The CBN cannot intervene because there is no dollar.
“So the market cabals always have dollars with them. And they work in circles. They have dollars with them; they are the ones supplying dollars to the market, and they make a hell of a profit from the circles. So which business can be better than that?” he queried.
Meanwhile, the Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Confederated Facilitators Limited (CFL) Group of companies, Engr. Lai Omotola, has, however, called on the Federal Government to shun the idea of borrowing money to give palliatives, saying that the right idea was to borrow money to invest.
He said the government should rather borrow money and put it into greenfield projects, noting that if the government were to “rehabilitate Ajaokuta Steel in Lokoja without putting any form of politics into it, that thing is going to generate a lot of jobs, and it’s going to pay a lot of taxes.”
“Just like I keep telling people, there was nothing wrong with Nitel; it was people working at Nitel that something was wrong with. This is because if there was something wrong with Nitel, the same licence that Nitel had is what was given to MTN, given to Airtel, and given to Glo, the same certificate, and the combination of all of them has a total market capital of N10 trillion, and they are paying their highest taxes. Do you understand?
“So if people in Nitel were okay, they would have done everything Glo and everyone else was supposed to do, and Nitel would be like them today. But because they were shortsighted, let us chop, chop, and look at how they lost everything to all these people who carry their profits away from the country when they are benefiting from our air here. What we sold to them was just air, the certificate they paid for,” he said.
“There are companies in America today whose reserves are bigger than those of America; are you not aware? So the government should be thinking pro-business, and if they are going to increase our taxes, businesses have to come up with productive businesses, not suitcase businesses.
“People collected refinery licences; it was not the refinery they were looking at; it’s the crude oil to be collected every month they are looking at in the name of the refineries. That’s the way Nigerian businessmen think.
“But the government must understand that the way out of this thing is that we must be serious with business, that our business people must really do business, and we would support them. That’s the way to generate tax because if you have just 500 of the likes of MTN that are doing turnover of N1.5 trillion every year, can you imagine? That will be good, not the way we think, which is for the short moment,” he added.
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