By Omos Oyinbode, Asaba
Former Delta State gubernatorial aspirant, Chief Clement Ofuani, has described the stable price of market products as a key achievement of the federal government and an indication that the country’s dependence on imports had greatly reduced.
Chief Ofuani stated this in an exclusive chat with our correspondent in Asaba, the Delta State capital.
Ofuani, who is a seasoned Economist and a Chartered Accountant of over two decades, attributed the price stability to the transformation achieved in the agricultural sector to President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration.
He said the achievement had led to less importation and more local production and processing of agricultural products, adding that the stable market prices of these products had helped Nigerians scale through the period of the depreciation of the naira.
Explaining further, he said “some few years back, as soon as the value of the naira drops, the average Nigerian will get to know by the increased price of foodstuff, but that has changed. Prices have remained stable even throughout the festive period undermining the fall of the naira value. This shows that we are importing less now and we are producing more locally. This is an achievement but the ‘Change propaganda’ of the opposition party has not allowed Nigerians to appreciate this feat”.
Chief Ofuani, who is also the Secretary of the Delta State Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) campaign council, described the transformation agenda of President Goodluck Jonathan as an effective means of tackling the problems of Nigerians, by first tracing the cause and addressing it, just as he claimed it to be the best way of handling Nigeria’s structural problems as against the cosmetic change where economic commodities only experience surface change.
Speaking further, he said that there is the need to improve further by adding value to the agricultural products before exporting, as it would bring more income into the nation’s coffers instead of exporting some of these products raw, only to import them after they have been further refined by other countries.
He explained that “if you export cocoa as cocoa, it is less valued and cheaper, and these other countries end up dictating the price they want to sell the finished products; but if we go further to process it into products like chocolate before exporting, we become the final determiners of the market price of chocolate”.
