Foolery of CBN under Emefiele, by Ahmed Musa Hussaini

What Emefiele and his boss are doing to the naira is another form of banditry. It is nothing short of treason. Nigeria is bleeding both physically and financially.

Granted that even major currencies globally are taking a hit, but there was never any respite for the naira since Meffy’s first year. His expansion of CBN’s so called development interventions (some thing his predecessor started) helped set the economy on a downward inflationary spiral and rising liabilities.

Emefiele’s single job is to stabilize the naira, and he failed woefully at that, and is busy moving around sharing money to farmers and throwing money at different projects, usurping the mandates of core development finance institutions like BOA, BOI, DBN, etc; severely underfunding and undermining them in the process.

Global economic trends aside, it is simply poor management, and the complete lack of synergy between fiscal and monetary policies, both (CBN & MOFi) supervised by utterly incompetent officials, with neither the pedigree to drive market confidence nor the individual credibility to push through needed reforms.

As long as the top execs at CBN continue to remain loyal by supplying dollars to a bunch of unpatriotic elites around the president, his job is not only secure but even earned him a second term. He even had the effrontery to enter the APC presidential contest, casting a partisan shadow on the CBN.

The worse thing that could happen to a country is to have social, economic and political instabilities all at once. The first two are already self-evident, and they may intractably push the nation towards political instability if the current drift is not properly arrested as we move towards 2023.

The next Nigerian president has his job clearly cut out. If the next administration decides to open Buhari’s books like he tried to do against Jonathan’s, the scandals are enough to dominate our news headlines for the next 8 years!

Nigerians must brace for tough times ahead. Let’s hope I’m very very wrong on this. Let’s also hope, like with all other adversities, that we somehow manage to respond with tenacity and grit far greater than what’s expected of us.

But more importantly, let’s vote for those we honestly believe possess the capacity, grit and determination to turn the country around. Don’t let anyone deceive you that you’re wasting your vote by voting certain candidates. After all, it is better to ‘waste’ your vote than put a misfit in power and fall on the wrong side of history!