Restoring the naira as a store of value, By Uddin Ifeanyi

Much of the palaver over the recent meeting of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s policy committee was exercised by how well the apex bank is doing its job. Against its primary goal of maintaining price stability, the CBN’s Monetary Policy Committee’s decision to recalibrate its monetary policy rate (MPR) in order to align it with the market invited the most attention. First, there is the question of what the MPR anchors. In reality, nothing. Ideally, however, the CBN’s policy rate should transmit price signals through the financial system, influencing saving, borrowing, liquidity, inflation expectations, and in the end, the naira’s exchange rate. It should, in other words, signal the central bank’s intentions. Yet, we have had years in which the MPR stoically remained unchanged even as inflation ran riot, and the naira’s exchange rate came under severe downward pressure.

The CBN has regularly papered over this crack with an often-bewildering arsenal of tools — including some eccentric flimflams that it has deployed in recent times. But this only raises further questions as to how useful even these are. Take the cash reserve requirement. At 45% for deposit money banks, it means that nearly half of banks’ qualifying deposits are warehoused with the central bank at any given time. While these sums may not, therefore, be available to build bubbles in the foreign exchange and equity markets, they are not likewise available for lending. Even if we argue that long-term lending ought properly to be funded by equity, banks and not shareholders should bear the burden of financing businesses’ working capital needs. Then, there is the small matter of how the CBN’s cash reserve requirement might be just as orphaned as its policy rate.

Banks raising naira deposits end up paying the CRR tax. In an economy that has witnessed considerable dollarisation — “the process where a country uses a foreign currency (most often the greenback) alongside or completely in place of its own domestic currency” — over the years, does it matter that deposits into domiciliary accounts are not CRR compliant? And how?

Might the “dollarisation” phenomenon hold the key to the CBN’s toolkit’s redundancies? Countries formally adopt the dollar in place of their domestic currencies when locals lose faith in the latter. This process restores the stability that struggling economies often find unable to achieve with their currencies and drives investment inflows. Nigeria’s dollarisation is only partial and barely policy adjacent. Yet, while the country may not have lost the gains — seigniorage — from printing its own currency that is one consequence of dollarisation, the CBN looks to have partially lost control of the monetary policy space, with the sums that Nigerians increasingly park in their dollar accounts.

There are, thankfully, many ways to regain this control without having to nationalise dollar deposits. Neither the CBN nor the government can talk their way out of this, though. You cannot tell Nigerians to keep their savings in naira while offering them a savings rate below inflation. The smart choice in this circumstance is for domestic economic actors to move their savings into dollars, property, equities, commodities, inventory, or other assets. Giving Nigerians a reason to save in naira should thus be the central goal of a policy reset. How to do this? We have got to keep inflation low. At 30% year-on-year a while back, the CPI numbers were an outrage. At a little over 15% today, it is still doing great injury to the naira. N100 today has roughly the purchasing power of only ₦50 after five years. The solution here goes beyond the CBN setting a credible, explicit medium-term inflation target. It also transcends the CBN laying out incentive structures that make deviations from this target costly both politically and institutionally. More than this, the national commitment to the CBN not financing fiscal deficits must be religious and total. While this means that monetary policy is no longer subordinate to the federal government’s financing requirements, it must aim at positive real interest rates for savers.

Still a spectre haunts monetary policy in Nigeria. It is unfortunately not in the CBN’s gift to exorcise the nightmare that the federal government’s financing requirements have become. How do we persuade our public sector boffins that a government that persistently spends more than it can sustainably pay for creates pressure for any of higher taxation, additional borrowing, monetary accommodation, inflation, or the naira’s depreciation? If the naira is only as strong as Nigeria’s balance sheet, then the task of getting both the fiscal and monetary authorities to operate under a common nominal inflation anchor must begin with reducing recurrent expenditure, broadening the tax base instead of increasing the tax rate, returning off-budget borrowing back to the budget, publishing complete fiscal accounts, improving the quality of public investment, establishing a credible medium-term strategy, and ceasing to use the CBN as a piggy bank.

Hopefully, this should help the economy produce more tradable goods and services. Because the naira represents a claim on the economy by anyone holding it, we cannot permanently defend the currency’s exchange rate through interest rates and reserves, if the economy continually uses up more foreign exchange than it earns. In other words, then, the economy must work for the naira to work.

Uddin Ifeanyi, a journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.