The Emir was speaking at the 15th Joint Planning Board & National Council on Development Planning, and excerpts of his speech were tweeted online by the handle of the Ministry of Budget @KDMobp.
Below are 15 important quotes from his speech.
- Nigeria must drop the habit of borrowing to pay salaries and service recurrent expenditures.
- There is nothing happening today that we didn’t forecast years ago because all actions have consequences.
- We created billionaires from Oil subsidies in the past. We are making the same mistake with Forex Subsidies.
- As an Emir, I can seat in my garden and make phone calls to access $10M @ N197 per $ then sell it off at nothing less than N300.
- With just a phone call, I’m making a profit of over a billion naira. That is what people are doing now.
- Any system that allows you sit in your garden & make a billion naira without investing a Kobo is a wrong system.
- We created the recession we are in now and I hope the President won’t make the mistakes Jonathan made.
- We are not being sincere when we say we are in a recession because of the fall in oil prices. What happened to other sectors?
- Petroleum subsidy empowers a small group of criminals rather than the poor masses it was meant for.
- If you must subsidise anything, please it should be for production rather than consumption.
- In 2011, we earned $16B from Oil revenues. $8b was spent for LCs while the remaining $8b was spent on subsidising fuel.
- We spent a whooping $8billion on subsidising fuel. Not a dime was spent on infrastructure, education or schools.
- To get out of this recession, the FG must set the FX rate to incentivise capital inflows, catalyse FDI & FDI funding.
- The FG must address failure in the power sector value chain starting with the DISCOS.
- I’m a friend of this administration but if they decide to run Nigeria aground, I will become the opposition.