Ifeanyi Ubah-nomics and the Naira stability

“We are not in a financial crisis. We are in knowledge crisis.”
–Robert Kiyosaki

There is this story of the res­cued failed ship and impec­cability of sound and un­common informal knowledge. The ship’s owners tried one expert af­ter another, but none of them could figure out how to fix the failed en­gine of the ship. They went as far as hiring the services of Professors of Mechanical Engineering and Tech­nocrats with vast expertise in ma­chine designs from Ivy League Uni­versities and automobile industries. These highly rated experts tried to resuscitate the failed ship engine but to no avail. As the owners of the ship were about giving up, they came up with an idea to try an old man who had been in the business of fixing boat engines for decades since the days of his childhood. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he im­mediately went to work. He in­spected the engine very carefully, from top to bottom.

Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He care­fully put his hammer away. Behold the engine was fixed! A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for $10,000. “What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!” So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please, send us an itemized bill.” The old man sent a bill that read: Tapping with a hammer = $2.00, knowing where to tap = $9,998.00. Grand Total=$10, 000. 00.
The above thought-provoking story exemplified the superiority of practical and informal knowl­edge of market forces above eco­nomic theories in some certain sec­tors of the economy. Nigeria’s local currency, the Naira, depreciated to a record level of N400 per dol­lar before the timely informal me­diation of Dr Patrick Ifeanyi Ubah, who used his Ubahnomics princi­ples to calm the storm in the Forex market, by breaking the backbone of speculators who were profit­ing from the round-tripping and hoarding of foreign currencies to create artificial scarcity and drive the nation’s currency cum econo­my into a ditch.

Like or hate him, Dr Ifeanyi Ubah is a young man from a hum­ble background, whose sheer hard work and ingenuity propelled him to enviable height of greatness and international reckoning. He has al­ways come to the rescue of Nige­rian economy whenever the cabal and cartel are almost having their way.
Not too long ago, his patriot­ic intervention helped in resolv­ing petrol crisis that nearly crip­pled the economy of Nigeria, when President Buhari was newly sworn as Nigerian President. Courageous and nationalist zeal of Dr Ubah broke the monopoly of oil market­ers who wanted to hold the entire nation to ransom using non-pay­ment of subsidy claims as a flim­sy excuse.

After observing the strangula­tion of small businesses and suffer­ings of Nigerians, as a result of the hitherto depreciating Naira which reached all-time low of N400/$, Dr Ubah in his magnanimity, threw in the same magic wand again into the Foreign Exchange market, via his masterstroke economic lexicon which can be termed ‘Ubahnom­ics’, which has rescued Nigeria’s le­gal tender, the Naira from its previ­ously free-fall and saved the nation’s fragile economy from colossal and monumental collapse, especially when all the government institu­tions saddled with the responsible of regulating the nation’s monetary and fiscal policies had run out of ideas on how to reinvent the local currency and resuscitate the ailing economy.

President John. F. Kennedy of America, in one of his inspiration­al speeches said: “The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by sceptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were and ask why not?” It is now obvious that Dr If­eanyi Ubah decided to ask this im­portant question just to save the economy not minding who takes the credit.

While economic pundits cum proponents and opponents of de­valuation of the Naira were engag­ing one another in intense intellec­tual fireworks on how to save the Naira from further depreciation, little did they know that solutions to our economic predicaments did not rest in their wild goose chase argument. Some social commen­tators attributed the free fall of the Naira to dwindling oil prices in the international market and over-de­pendence of the Nigerian populace on imported goods and services, as well as increasing demand for for­eign certificates and medical tour­isms abroad. The likes of Prof Wole Soyinka and Pat Utomi called for convocation of an emergency eco­nomic summit to find solutions to the hitherto fledging Naira.

The critics of President Buhari’s Economic Team had a field day casting aspersions on the lacklus­tre, inconsistent and reactive ten­dencies of his economic managers, for not being proactive and pro­spective enough in stemming the hitherto nose-diving of the Naira, which instigated a chain reaction of inflation and untold economic hardship on hapless Nigerians.

When critics were calling for the head of President Buhari for the de­preciation of the Naira, Dr Ifeanyi Ubah was busy plotting the graph on how to recuse the currency us­ing informal and practical eco­nomic policy by asking the fol­lowing questions: Was Nigeria the only nation hit by falling oil prices in the international market? Why would Naira depreciate faster than any other currency of the world in less than two weeks? Was Nigeria the only nation whose economy is import-dependent? Are we the only nation making most of its foreign exchange earnings from crude oil? Even when President Buhari refused to approve devaluation of the Nai­ra, which steadied official (CBN) ex­change rate at N197, the Naira kept plummeting like a javelin. What might be the cause?
After long introspection and postulations on the fate of the hith­erto depreciating Naira and dwin­dling economy, Dr Ubah threw his first salvo when he went on Chan­nels TV to declare his intention to save the economy via the intro­duction of Ubahnomics – practi­cal and workable economic poli­cy. He pledged to stake his N500 billion worth of assets, by forfeit­ing them to the Federal Govern­ment, if his Ubahnomics failed to save the Naira from further depre­ciation within 30 days, if consulted. Just by mere mentioning of Ubahn­omics, which was conceptualised and promulgated by no other per­son than Dr Patrick Ifeanyi Ubah, behold, it worked! Within a cou­ple of days, the Naira jerked back to N250/$ instead of the previous exorbitant rate of N400/$.

Can anyone doubt again the indefatigability of this Financial Genius called Dr Ifeanyi Ubah? Ubahnomics sent jitters down the spine of foreign exchange spec­ulators, who made a kill by out­smarting regulators through un­imaginable round-tripping and rent-seeking, which pushed the poor currency, the Naira, into cess­pool of depreciation and unofficial devaluation. Dr Ubah’s unofficial, un-academic and informal mon­etary policy did not only rescue President Buhari and his lacklus­tre Economic Team (if any), from the anger of economically frustrat­ed Nigerians, but affirmed the age-long quote of Albert Einstein that: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what he learned in school.”

The effectiveness and practicabil­ity of Ubahnomics in resolving this foreign exchange turbulence, has proved that solutions to the nation’s economic crisis does not lie on the shoulders of MBA degree holders from Harvard University or Mas­sachusetts Institute of Technolo­gy (MIT), who dwell so much on out-dated and impractical econom­ic jargons, but on practical econ­omists like Ifeanyi Ubah, who has turned thousands of dollars into millions and millions into billions.

President Obama being a Dem­ocrat, yet appointed a Republican, Robert Gates as his Defence Secre­tary in overall interest of National Security of Americans. President Buhari should look beyond politi­cal affiliation and make Dr Ifeanyi Ubah his Economic Consultant and member of his yet to be con­stituted Economic Management Team in the interest of the nation’s economic revival, because in see­ing, we believed.