 Welcome back, those were snippets of the President's broadcast of yesterday as well as the assentum to the 2024 budget. Now, improving dynamics in the oil sector will provide tailwinds to Nigeria's economy this year. The 650,000-barre-up-a-day dangote refinery located near Lagos received its first cruise shipments last month, indicating that fuel production will commence in the first quarter of this year. Now, for decades, Nigeria has struggled to meet its domestic fuel needs through local refining due to underinvestment in its refineries, with mineral fuel imports having reached roughly 40% of total imports in 2022. While the dangote refinery will not reach its maximum production level this year, it will still significantly reduce Nigeria's dependency on imported fuel. International Finance and Economic Analysts, Mokhtar, Mohamed joins me now to discuss further. Many thanks for joining me, Mokhtar. Thank you for having me. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. Let's quickly examine some of the key takeaways from the President's speech and other aspects. According to the President, the primary objective on his agenda is ensuring food security and reducing food inflation. From what we know, the National Bureau of Statistics revealed that the nation's food inflation is at an alarming rate of 32.84%. The President said to ensure constant food supply, security, and affordability that they would step up plan to cultivate 500,000 hectares of farmland across the country to grow maize, rice, wheat, millet, and other staple crops. They also launched addresses in farming with about 120,000 hectares of land in Jigawa State last November under the National Weed Development Program. What do you think of this rollout? Nigerians were actually almost so hungry in the year 2023. How do we address food security for 2024, Mokhtar? I like the way you put it. How do we show food security? That's what security always comes. So for us in Nigeria and as a standard, to have food security is to have security so that the farmers will be able to go to farm. All this policy is a good policy, but if you don't have farmers going to go to farm because of insecurity, you cannot achieve it. We look at the states that are the food basket, that are the Northeast, and most of the states are suffering from insecurity challenges. So as long as the President is trying to address all critical issues that he said, I think the most important one is bringing security back. Once you bring security back, security is a foreign of prosperity. So once you have security, then the people will have confidence to go out to do their business and they will start prospering. So listening to the President's speech, I mean, it's all about talk, talk, talk. It has been like that since the President came in. You talk, this is the policy work. This is what I wanted to do. The only policy that the President have hit the ground running with is the removal of subsidy, the fruit in the currency. Every other policy they have told us about attractive investment bringing time exchange rate by December. Pretty no one has worked this thus far. So I think for me, they need to do a lot, a lot, a lot of work in terms of making the award reaction is more or less becoming like the people want to hear me. This is what I'm going to talk to them. The speech of Mr. President incident does not come up with details of what he wants to do. The only details you could see the President came out with is in the area of when he said the security, they will improve the security apparatus and that. But every other thing was just like, let me just see them. After I seen it, then we could see them and begin to have a look for solutions to it. All right. Now, for tax and fiscal policy reforms, the President said he's administration will reform the tax and fiscal policies. You said specifically that the President has not really said the specific word, but he said they want to enable business environment to thrive. And he also added that he will not hesitate to remove any clog hindering local and foreign investment in the country. What do you really think we should do differently? We've always talked about widening the tax net and then making sure that the poor people are not overtaxed. How do you see the outlook for taxation and the fiscal policy for this year, 2024? I think for taxation, I'm a little bit hopeful, maybe because of the presidential committee on taxation murdered by somebody that knows what is doing for all these participants. So maybe I'm excited on that and I'm waiting for the White Paper to come out or the report of that committee to come out there. We'll see how we'll take it from there. Secondly, when the President talked about businesses, that was a good one. But again, it didn't tell us how they are going to achieve this. When it comes to SMEs, when it comes to business, all are based on demand and supply. So you do your own work, demand and supply, we take care of it, of itself. So there are good, like I skip saying, good speeches on the course of them, I mean, businesses and that. And I think the most important thing that can happen in the tax net is widening the tax brackets. And when I say widening the tax, there's not taxing already taxed. But I'm saying widening the tax bracket, now we begin to move to the informal sector. The thing is that up to this moment, we will not be able to absorb the informal sector. And until we do that, there will not be able to catch a large number of people that are blaming the economy. So what the government should do is try to come out with innovation with strategies on how to get the informal sector to begin to pay tax. Let that woman that sells Pepe be wanting to pay tax. Let that woman that does business by the roadside wants to pay tax. So that for me is going to be the game changer. Not just widening the tax bracket, taxing the tax, oh, you don't want to tax the poor. So those are a lot of things that the president needs to do. I hope in terms of physical policy, seeing that no matter what you do in the monetary side, when the physical side does not synergize with you, then that's a challenge. And I hope this is a message of how we change in those areas. Let's talk about implementation of the new leaving wage for workers. The president also affirmed his commitment to increase the leaving wage of workers this year. According to him, economic aspirations and the material well-being of the poor, the most vulnerable and the working people shall not be neglected. Muktawe been talking about minimum wages since late the fourth quarter of last year. We know what happened with the labor strikes and every other thing. What is the leaving wage on them? How do you really see this working out this year and the capacity of the federating states? Do you think they can actually follow suit? Let's start with the last question. Ordinary, every state would have to do its own minimum wage. Lagos state should not be collecting the minimum wage. Somebody in Giga or Kano state, Lagos state workers. Those are different in terms of cost of living. If you look at the Bureau of Statistics report, you'll realize cost of living in some places are higher than cost of living in these other places. Now, the whole point of the government is going to set up a minimum wage. That doesn't mean that's where it will stand. So the state will be forced to pay them. And I don't think any state should complain about paying minimum wage this year because again, their income has drastically increased. States are sharing one of the best interests of income they've ever said before. And that was because of the removal of subsidies. So I think there's still a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot to be done in that aspect to make sure that they have a living minimum wage. And like you say, what is the living minimum wage? If you see a minimum wage that would be above inflation and pressure, that is the living minimum wage. Whether by minimum wage, you'll be able to attract inflation. I mean to be able to address inflation in my purchasing power. And also I still have more, I still have some also left to tackle other issues. So for me, it's not just the same like I keep saying, the government kept saying this is what they want to do, what they want to do. But they have not been able to do any of those policies yet. They come up with one excuse or the other. I hope this could just be the game changer. All right, let's talk about Tempe Trillium. There's been so much hope on the Dangote since last year. Modular, Port Hacquard and the Dangote Refinery are set to begin operation this year. The president stated that the local refineries, that's the Port Hacquard Refinery as well as the privately owned one. That's the Dangote Refinery. We all come on stream today. It's as though we are putting so much hope on Dangote for this year. How do you see this? Is this a civil line in Mukta? Will this change all the issues that we've had in the downstream sector? It will change it Justin. It will change it. It will change it. I'm confident it will change it. It's going to have Dangote Refinery come on stream. And so we are going to see a lot of activities under space. Job, direct job, indirect job. So we're so excited looking forward to it. Hopefully we don't have any issues again because they have started saying that by December they will start distributing PMS. And I mean, these are others have not seen that yet. Hopefully, maybe we will see that later before the end of this month. Again, Dangote Refinery, like I said, is one of the largest refinery in the world. So definitely we expect it to hit some capacity, but it will not start with hitting maximum capacity in terms of production, but as time goes on it will. But what is Dangote Refinery saying they will concentrate on is to make sure they have PMS supplied to the Nigerian market. Now, would that bring the cost of PMS down? In the short term, it will bring the cost down, but not relative to how we want it. But the long term, when market competition comes in, I'm happy that the damn Dangote is thinking of coming home with this refinery. That's the center NMPC is saying that Potakor Refinery will be ready. And Potakor Refinery is closer to the base than moving cheap from Potakor to Lagos for Dangote Refinery. And we're moving it to LMM Potakor too. It's going to be a good thing to look at. I think for me, the best thing that can happen to us this year is to get those two refinery working in optimal levels. And then they will reduce our dependence on importation of fuel, which if you look at from the data from natural fuel statistics, that's the one that take the last chunk of the effects in the economy. So this would be a very good one for us. All right. One thing that Nigerians are still talking about, you know, each time is some power electricity, all of that. The president also promised steady power supply through Power Installation Project. Okay. So Mukta, I just want to get your thought concerning that because we are tired of hearing upneppa all the time and all of that. So how do we really just go about getting steady power supply from this year and beyond? I think steady power supply will do more in both administratively, technically, because the administrative part is to get the right players to come and want to have licenses. And the technical part is for them to have the technical partner. And then the financial part, you don't have the financial muscles. If you look at the privatization that we've had before, most of these three aspects are missing, and that's why we are still challenging our system upneppa. Because the finance is not there, the technical know-how is not there. The administrative regulatory framework is not as deep as we want it to be. So when you look at these three factors, those are the three factors that can actually transmit power to our households and also be a game changer. But one of these factors are not being addressed by the government. You cannot see any result. Why is government holding on to distribution? Why is government wanting to be the sole one to distribute? And government say, okay, we are distributing. We have about more than 10,000 megawatt, but we can only impart seven. So how much, as administratively, be able to enforce some policies on the discourse to be able to start maximizing the numbers or receiving all that they have for. And what they need to do is to get the technical partner to work on their transmission and all the things we can do. So they see a lot of work to be done. But like I said, it seems to be saying all the right things every time, but it doesn't seem to be doing all the right things always. All right. So Mukta, I don't know how much dollars we are able to amass for 2023. Because if you have so much dollars right now, you're like the big man because of the whole forex regime issue and all of that. But let's project for 2024. I don't have so much dollars, as it is. What should we be doing about our forex regime, the issues of inflation, and our monetary policy generally, as we round off, what should we be looking at for this year 2024? Monetary policy, deal with inflation, deal with exchange rate volatility. Then if you deal with inflation, price will stabilize. So and to deal with inflation, you need to have track effects because over 90 percent of what comes when we bring it out of the show of this country. So we need to do that. We need to do that. The monetary quality, you need to step in and step in on time because if you don't, then exchange rate is going to be a big, big, big, big problem. Come here. If you look at what Bloomberg have already said that they expect our Nairat to be one of the worst performing currency in 2024, even after being one of the worst performing currency in 2023. So there's still a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot to be done in that space. And hopefully, I think the government should channel most of its energy into that space to bring in that necessary stability that we want here, that space. All right. I just want to squeeze in the final, I promise you it's the final question. Specifically, the real sector, the manufacturing, what do you see, what do you project and what should we be doing differently this year? I think that sector is still having tough this year in the area of if you don't create stability in FX rates, that sector was the worst hit sector last year. And if you don't create that stability, it will still be the worst hit sector this year. So what are we going to do? They need to work as much as possible to create stability in that space. That is the only thing that sector is looking for now, stability. Once you create that stability, it will address a lot of issues. So I think we see, we all know what to do. They need to create stability in that space for me. That is all we need to talk about. Create that stability. Let's for once have a stable relative B between the Naira and the dollar. How far can we go this year, Justin? It all depends on two key things. Number one, the multilefinery is coming up soon. So the region on FX, we go down based on the data from Nigerian Bureau of Statistics. So that could have drive down the exchange rate. Number two, attract foreign investors back to Nigeria by that portfolio of foreign direct investors. Number three, let the exchange rate merge. One that is major in the exchange rate. Nigeria, that's what I would rather remit through the bank. But once there's no measure through the exchange rate, they will always look for me to send that money for that money to be exchanged in the parallel market. So the government need to make stability. And once you create stability, you have disrupted the system of the currency, what I call trying to get our economics on the economic term that we use. People, just currency, they just try to, without any fundamentals. So currency speculators, as you are able to get enough liquidity into the system, then you are able to deal with foreign currency speculators. When you deal with foreign currency speculators, when they get their hands on when they come into the system, rates will come down. And the next phase of it is how do you maintain that rate? All right. You need to consistently do these three things that you are doing to consistently put rates at that stable rate for a very long time. Thank you so much, Mukta. We just hope the government will have a listening ear and be able to just stabilize them, these critical sectors, and there's some points that you have made today. Many thanks for all of the insight. Would you appreciate them? Thank you, Justin, for having me. Yeah, our pleasure. And that's the size of the show for today. I am Justin Acadone. Many thanks for being there. Bye for now.