The special adviser to the president on media and publicity, Ajuri Ngelale, has predicted that with the success so far recorded by President Bola Tinubu administration’s intervention in the foreign exchange (FX) market and the refineries resuming full operations, a stronger naira should be achieved in the first quarter of 2025. Ngelale who projected a brief made available to newsmen in Abuja yesterday said, “The President has been very consistent in his view that the labour pains felt by our people and the incredible sacrifices made by our people over the past 10 months would be rewarded across the board. The President’s multi-faceted approach to ridding the nation’s foreign exchange market of malign actors and sharp practices has provided a platform for the sustainable strengthening of our national currency against all global currencies and this is what we are seeing.
But there is still much work to be done and this is not a time for celebration. It is a time for doubling down and working harder to ensure that inflation is sustainably brought down in short order and that consumer-protecting regulatory agencies step up enforcement to ensure that our people are not short-changed by enterprises that fail to reflect the prevailing exchange rates on the pricing of goods and services across the board.
As our private and publicly-owned refineries resume operations between now and the first quarter of 2025, the nation’s cash position will dramatically improve to the extent that Nigerians can rightly expect a stronger naira and a fair reflection of its strength in the prices of commodities in the market place. Once you join the rising spending power of Africa’s population with the historic availability of trillions of naira for consumer credit that will bolster the real sector, you will see why Nigerians will be most pleased that they elected a financial engineer and businessman as president by the end of his first term in office, even as the signs are increasingly more evident today.”
