News Express

The Prices of major grain commodities in Nigeria will experience a bullish trend this year driven by the carry-on effect of the inflationary pressure on food prices that marked 2021, says AFEX, a leading commodities market player, in its annual commodities outlook report for the 2022 crop production and market year.
The report titled, “Annual Commodities Review & 2022 Outlook,” asserted that the combination of a rise in energy prices in the global market, which ultimately results in a hike
in farming inputs, such as fertilisers; increased demand that has surpassed supply levels across
the country; FX rate deterioration; market uncertainty exacerbated by the fact that 2022 is
a pre-election year; hoarding activities by traders in expectation of higher valuations, are dominant factors that would lead to a significant surge in the prices of grains during the new
2021/2022 trading season.

Has the December inflation upswing presented a headroom for the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Monetary Policy Committee to manoeuvre on rates? One of the words out there is that there is a strong possibility that a rate tightening measure could be something the wise men and women would pull out of their shared magician hat on Tuesday, January 25, 2022, at the conclusion of the first Monetary Policy Committee meeting for the new year.
For the record, the MPC has maintained the status quo 25 times in the last 28 meetings and the recent unexpected surge in inflation could be the pedal mounting pressures on the monetary policy authorities to possibly hike rates after tomorrow.

Projection by leading African and Nigeria based credit rating agency, Agusto & Co, of huge potential foreign exchange inflows into Nigeria, appears to expose a serious lacuna in the management of the inflows and the economy by both fiscal and monetary authorities.
Agusto & Co will provide fuller details and explanations on its key projections on the economy for 2022 on Thursday, but in an advanced briefing note made available to Business a.m., the company projects that Nigeria’s foreign currency inflows of $90 billion will be more than twice its foreign currency debt of $44 billion at the end of 2022.

Nigeria is desperate for revenue. Its treasury does not have plenty of cash to provide for all its needs. The country is already highly geared on borrowing, both domestic and foreign, with also a high ‘ways and means’ exposure with the Central Bank of Nigeria which is unaccounted for in the debt profile released by the Debt Management Office.
Nigeria has been running deficit budgets for years and it now seems like a normal thing in the government’s revenue and expenditure management framework.

An Official public debt pile-up by federal and state governments that has raced to N38.01 trillion at the last time of counting by the Debt Management Office is being described as a knee on the necks of Nigerians in the lead up to 2022, the undoubtedly lame-duck year of the Muhammadu Buhari Presidency, when all attention is expected to be focused on the soapbox and politicians hold sway, jostling, scheming and manoeuvring towards the 2023 general elections.

President Mohammadu Buhari and Zainab Ahmed, his minister of finance, budget and national planning, appear set to go out all guns blazing in search of revenues in every available space for the federal treasury from the very first day of 2022 with a new Finance Bill 2021set to be passed into law this month.
Buhari and Ahmed will be seeking to squeeze revenues in the form of taxes that will be imposed on such things as bets, lottery, app stores, foreign digital coys, among others, in a desperate bid to generate funds to boost dwindling revenues and finance the huge N5.62 trillion estimated budget deficits for fiscal 2022.
Nigeria’s fiscal performance has been poor for more than six years and Buhari’s finance minister, Ahmed, has not particularly provided appropriate fiscal policy leadership for the economy, with a lot of the push seen to be provided by the monetary authorities, who have led on many occasions in place of the fiscal authorities. Even Ahmed’s predecessor, Kemi Adeosun, did not fare better either.

The International Monetary Fund has said the continued use of the global financial safety net will need to be kept in place until the global pandemic crisis comes to an end as the total stock of international reserve holdings has more than doubled to about $14 trillion at the end of 2020 since the global financial crisis, while other layers of the safety net rose tenfold to about $4 trillion.
The global financial safety net is a set of institutions and mechanisms that provide insurance against crises and financing to mitigate their impact and this safety net has four main layers.
The layers, according to the IMF, include countries’ own international reserves; bilateral swap arrangements whereby central banks exchange currencies to provide liquidity to financial markets; regional financial arrangements by which countries pool resources to leverage financing in a crisis; and the IMF.

Nigeria's Fiscal Authorities Appear to have clearly lost steam and now seem unable to find the permutation to come out of the economic maze they have been walking in for well over six years following a decision to go in with eyes wide open and unleash the wrath of inflation through an ill-prepared, less thought-out fuel subsidy policy set for the new year.
It is what some analysts are likening to a government acting out a ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ policy against its citizens.
Analysts warn that they see the government appearing to be acting in a knee jerk manner and would be extending the misery quotient for citizens, amidst avalanche policy permutations that have not been fit for purpose over the last six years.

The Last Central Bank of Nigeria's Monetary Policy Committee meeting in September saw members vote unanimously to leave the policy rate of 11.5 per cent and other parameters unchanged with the hope that a held posture would allow the recovery of output growth and the downward trend in inflation to continue smoothly.
For the sixth and final time in 2021, the committee is gathering again today (Monday) and tomorrow (Tuesday) to decide on major economic parameters in the face of recent domestic macroeconomic developments
Unsurprisingly, though, a myriad of economic analysts have in their assertions noted that the MPC at this final bi-monthly gathering for 2021 will, in the face of output expansion and moderating inflation, stick to the use of unorthodox tools within its arsenal, as all corners of the domestic economy lighting green, will give it no room for rates manoeuvring when members emerge from the gathering.

As COP26 Rounded off over the weekend, Nigeria and other member countries who are shareholders of the African Development Bank are to benefit from $136 million in additional donor commitments for the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa.
SEFA is a multi-donor trust fund managed by the African Development Bank. Denmark, SEFA’s founding partner and first donor, unveiled 100 million Danish kroner (around $14 million) in fresh commitments. Germany, another SEFA donor country, recently increased its
contribution to SEFA by another €100 million. The significant German contribution to SEFA was first announced during the UN high-level dialogue on energy last September.
Nigeria, though AfDB’s biggest continental equity holder and Africa’s largest economy, her citizens bear the brunt of poor access to electricity.
As of June 2020, the World Bank country update indicated that Nigeria had the world’s highest population of people without access to electricity.