Aliko Dangote, a billionaire businessman, has stated that the use of naira for crude will lower demand for foreign exchange by 40%.
He said this on Tuesday, when he declared the start of fuel production at the Dangote refinery in Lagos.
Speaking on Arise TV, Dangote stated, “I would want to applaud the people of Nigeria and President Bola Tinubu’s government for establishing an atmosphere for us to develop, as well as achieving this huge goal of providing electricity to our people for growth and prosperity.
“I want to thank President Bola Tinubu for creating this idea of Naira for crude and Naira for the product. Doing that will give a lot of stability to the Naira and remove 40 per cent of the demand for dollars. That’s not just it, there is a lot of round tripping.”
He stated that tracking loaded vehicles would facilitate national consumption calculations.
“Now that we have this refinery working, it will show the true consumption of Nigeria. We can track each loaded truck and we will try as much as possible to track the loaded ships. Trucks, we can tell you where they are and for some of the products we have, we can tell you the consumption,”he said.
In April, the Federal Government announced that indigenous refineries could now purchase crude oil in naira or dollars.
It also said that Nigeria’s total crude oil and condensate reserves have climbed to 37.5 billion barrels as of January 1, 2024, with a life index of 68.01 years.
When fully operational, the Dangote Refinery can handle 650,000 barrels of oil per day, more than half of which is converted into gasoline.
