Pure Bliss No Longer Tastes Good? The CBN is to Blame

How Central Banking is Responsible for the Decline in Product Quality

My First Encounter with the Divine Confection

In 2018, I travelled to Ogun state in the South-Western part of Nigeria on some business. I planned to stay at a hotel, but Lara (not her real name), a lady friend offered me her place to stay. I took her up on her offer not only because it would help me save the money that I would have otherwise spent on a hotel room but also because Lara was quite attractive, and I hoped that being in close proximity to her would give me the chance to be with her.

A few days passed and the business that took me to Ogun did not go as I had hoped, and I was disappointed, and I made plans to return home from Ogun state the following day. That evening, Lara – in an effort to cheer me up – asked me to take a walk with her. We had one of the more pleasant conversations in my life as we strolled that evening, and as we walked, she stopped at a store and bought a pack of Pure Bliss biscuits. I had seen the biscuits and wafers in stores everywhere back at home, but I never bothered to eat them. She said they were unbelievably delicious and promised I would be hooked if I tried them. She badgered me endlessly and since my desire to please her was greater than my lack of interest in the biscuits, I gave in.

As I held the confection up to my mouth, I caught a whiff of its creamy aroma, and as I took the first bite, I realized that it tasted even more delicious than the aroma let on. After we had eaten all that she bought; we went back to the store to buy some more. I also decided to try out the Pure Bliss wafers and just like the biscuit, the wafers did not disappoint. Each wafer stick was a perfectly cuboid shaped sandwich with the tastiest wafer at the top and bottom layers with various layers of thick-cream filling and more wafery goodness in between. The aroma – though more enchanting than the biscuit’s – paled in comparison to the taste. To cut the long story short, those desserts were my second-best experience on that failed business trip. I could not get enough of them. Everyone who had them had the same testimony about them as I did; they were really delicious. I binge-ate them so hard, I got sick of them after a few months.

One day in early 2022, I remembered how much I used to enjoy Pure Bliss products and decided to treat myself to one biscuit and one wafer. They still cost ₦100 per wafer or biscuit – same as they did in 2018. I tore open the wrap to find that the wafers looked a bit smaller than I remembered. They had next to no cream filling, smelled less appetizing, and seemed like they had been nibbled at by rodents. I would not have eaten it if I did not unwrap it myself. I do not exaggerate when I say that to my great disappointment, my beloved Pure Bliss wafers tasted how I assume a mildly sweetened carton would; very stale and bland. The price remained same, but the quality had greatly declined.

This phenomenon of declining quality is all too common in Nigeria. Some new product or service is introduced, and the service is so good that one cannot seem to get enough of it, only for the prices to rise and the quality to decline after some time.

The Central Bank of Nigeria is to Blame for this decline in Quality

If you ask 10 people why the quality of Pure Bliss and other products are in decline, 9 of them are sure to tell you that the greedy producers are responsible. Most people blame the greed of the makers of the products for increasing prices and or reducing quality so as to make more profit. Nothing could be further from the truth. The culprit is The Central Bank of Nigeria.

What connection does the CBN to the have to Pure Bliss and other products? Why should the country’s apex bank be blamed for the decline in quality of biscuits? To understand how the CBN is responsible, one has to understand the workings of the apex bank.

The Stated Goal of the CBN

The stated goal of the CBN is to stabilize prices in Nigeria. It is their goal to make sure prices are neither too high nor too low. Addressing the futility and foolishness of this goal is something that I will leave for another article. To achieve this pointless and destructive goal, the CBN — like all apex banks – uses the MONEY SUPPLY. Simply put, the money supply is the total amount of money in the economy. It is this money supply the CBN uses to force Pure Bliss and other businesses to increase prices and reduce quality.

How the CBN Operates: The Money Supply

As an individual, if I need money to purchase goods and services to satisfy my wants, I have limited options; I can work, beg, steal or if I have the skill, make convincing enough counterfeit Naira notes. Let us assume that I work for my money. This means that I offered someone else a good or service, and in exchange, I was rewarded by the one I served with money.

Businesses do the same; when they want money, they offer goods or services to people, and the people pay them.

Government mostly steal the money through taxation when they need to embark on projects or pay their workers. I do not call it ‘stealing’ by accident; what else would you call it when people and businesses are compelled to give a part of their monthly earnings or be forced by men with guns to go to prison. If given the choice to not pay taxes, would people not take it? Would anyone willingly pay taxes if the government gives them the option of not paying? Would they not rather keep their money and spend it on their needs, re-invest or save it in a bank to make profit through interest? If you would rather keep your money than give the government, then you agree that they take it from us forcefully. If this forceful extortion is not theft, I do not know what is.

When the CBN wants money to buy things or loan to the government, they offer neither good nor service like you, I, or businesses, they do not even forcefully extort taxes like the government. They do something more sinister; they print money out of thin air. This is neither a joke nor an exaggeration. They just type up a couple of billions into their computer systems and spend it. This is referred to as ‘increasing the money supply.’ They increase the supply of money to their benefit by buying goods and services produced by individuals and businesses, or by interest on loans given to the government. This money supply increase goes by fancy names to hide what it really is. It is commonly called ‘Quantitative Easing’ (QE), but in Nigeria, the nom du jour is ‘Ways and Means Lending.’ Let me pose a question; what would we call it, if a man had in his possession, technology that could print out Naira bills identical – in every way – to the ones issued by the CBN? We would call such a man a ‘counterfeiter’ and would be correct to do so. The only differences between a counterfeiter and the CBN are:

1.      CBN staff are not arrested when they do the same thing as counterfeiters

2.     CBN do the counterfeiting at a much larger scale than your everyday counterfeiter.

The CBN has printed over ₦22 trillion in less than a decade. I doubt all the counterfeit operations in Nigeria combined can successfully counterfeit a tiny fraction of that sum. CBN money supply increase is legalized counterfeiting.

The Effects of Money Supply Increases: Rising Prices and Falling Product Quality

Money supply increase is taught at university as a legitimate way of doing things, it is defended by intellectuals and government officials and some even laud it as a way to get out of recessions and to keep the economy running. It is a good thing that reality is not determined by consensus nor by the position one holds in society.

As has already been stated, the counterfeiter differs from the CBN only in scale and the fact that the CBN is legally encouraged to counterfeit while the counterfeiter is penalized for doing the same. That stated, how exactly does an increase in the money supply affect the economy? Simply put, it causes prices to rise (what is incorrectly called inflation). It is almost intuitive to most that more money chasing fewer goods will cause the prices of the goods to rise, but to understand why this is, one must first understand one of the features of money. Money is a good. A good is simply defined as “anything that we can use to satisfy our wants.” Since we use money to get the things we use to satisfy our wants, then money is a ‘good.’ More goods means more satisfaction of needs. If there are only 1 million cars in Nigeria, and an angel gifted Nigeria with 10 million more cars, the total number of cars in Nigeria would rise from one million to eleven million cars. Obviously, this is good for Nigeria. Same applies to bread; if there are 50 million loaves of bread in Nigeria, and some angel miraculously multiplies the bread and we now have 100 million additional loaves, leaving Nigerians with 150 million loaves of bread, this would mean more Nigerians have more bread to eat and more people are better off than before. More products are always more beneficial than less. That being the case, one might be tempted to think that one additional trillion Naira is better for the economy. After all, if the CBN prints one more trillion Naira. Nigerians are one trillion Naira richer. As I am about to demonstrate, this reasoning – when applied to money – is wrong.

Money differs from other goods in the sense that it is not used up or consumed by like other goods. Money does not ‘finish’[1] as other products do. A loaf of bread, a bunch of bananas, and other goods are used up (consumed) by people. If I buy one pack of Pure Bliss wafers at ₦100 per pack, the seller of has ₦100 and I have my wafers. The wafers are eaten by me, but the money remains with the seller. It is not used up like I used up the wafers. The wafers are consumed but the money remains. That same ₦100 can be used by the wafer seller to buy a bottle of zobo to quench his thirst. The same ₦100 – which was initially mine – still remains (in the hands of the zobo seller) but both the wafer I bought and the zobo the wafer seller bought have been consumed. This means that the quantity of products is reducing while the money remains the same. This reduction in the quantity of products creates scarcity. As is known, scarcity is the reason why goods are expensive. Water is essential to life but is ridiculously cheap but precious stones and metals which have no value in terms of the ability to keep us alive are some of the most expensive goods on the planet. Therefore, when counterfeiters (legal or illegal) create more money, they create more scarcity and cause the prices of goods to rise. They create more scarcity by causing the goods to be used up faster than they normally would.

As more money is introduced into the system by the CBN, more people have more money. They use this money to demand the diminishing (due to consumption) quantity of goods in the economy. As goods diminish faster due to increase in demand, unnatural scarcity occurs, and this scarcity causes prices to rise. This is how the CBN causes prices to rise.

Those who claim that CBN counterfeiting is good for the economy and can boost productivity might attempt to refute this by claiming that the created money goes into the production of new goods and services. People who make such claims are wrong because;

·        The time it takes to make new goods and services can range from hours (for simple products) to years for complex products like perennial crops and other agricultural products (many of which happen to be necessary for the production of other simple products). Meanwhile, it takes only seconds for the CBN to use their computers to type trillions of Naira into existence. This means that the created money will cause high prices long before the new goods are produced.

·        The production of these new goods and services by the created money also require already existing goods and services to be bought by the fake new money to use in the production of the new goods and services. This means the new goods would even be more expensive than before because the cost of making the new goods would be higher.

There is no way out of it, increasing the money supply only makes things more expensive for everyone. Why the CBN, and all central banks do this despite its disastrous outcome is a most sinister issue that I hope to thoroughly address in another article.

Anyone who insists that money creation is good for the economy, must be consistent and agree that counterfeiting is also good for the economy and must advocate for the decriminalization of counterfeiting. If CBN money creation is beneficial, then counterfeiters are not criminals but are actually economic saviours.

How is the CBN Responsible for the Poor Quality of Pure Bliss Biscuits

As has already been established, as the CBN counterfeits, all costs go up, including the costs of the materials for making Pure Bliss products. People often wrongly think that producers can just directly pass on every cost to the consumers. This is obviously not true. If I were told on that day in 2022 that I purchased the Pure Bliss wafers that it was ₦300 instead of ₦100, I would not have bought it. Pure Bliss products – delicious as they were before the CBN destroyed them – are not essential to life I would have walked away or looked for a cheaper alternative. Producers know this, so rather than pass on the increased cost of production to consumers, they would compromise on the quality. They would use less cream filling, less sugar, they would use the cheapest possible type of flour in the most miserly of ways when making the wafers. They might fire the former chef who made the wafers and hire a cheaper and less experienced chef. There are many ways for them to cut the production costs just so that they can still afford to maintain the ₦100 per pack of Pure Bliss.

Conclusion

This decline in Pure Bliss quality is not limited to Pure Bliss products. Every Nigerian can testify of the declining quality of most goods and services. To stay in business, producers might reduce the quality of the product, or reduce the quantity of the products, or raise the prices or all of these economic horrors combined. Look around you and you will observe that not only goods, but quality of services are also getting worse.

It should be stated that this legalized counterfeiting is not exclusive to the CBN. The commercial banks are also heavily involved in this inflationary racket but just like my solution to this problem of endless price increase and quantity and quality decline, I will save my criticism of them for another article.

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[1] This expression “does not finish” is not a grammatical error but is a saying that Nigerians use in everyday conversation.