Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, a former minister of education, has harshly criticised the Central Bank of Nigeria‘s naira swap policy (CBN).
The Federal Government is using the apex bank to pursue political “criminals it knows,” according to Ezekwesili, who made her views known on Sunday during a live appearance on Channels Television’s The 2023 Verdict, a special election show.
Examining the contentious CBN guideline that was said to combat vote-buying and illegally hoarded cash, she stated that the top bank must carefully consider “what are we solving for?”
Commenting about how she would approach the policy, the former vice president of the World Bank stated that given the recent technical advancements on the African continent, there was no justification for rolling it back.
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However, she expressed scepticism about the CBN’s execution of the strategy, stating that becoming cashless effectively means promoting the use of “less cash” rather than completely eliminating banknotes. She claims that making a solid transition plan is the best course of action if one wants to reduce the use of cash as a form of trade in “our society.”
“But there’s a second thing that we seem to be solving for which has now taken ascendancy over the monetary policy. We are using the central bank to solve the problem of criminality in our politics,” she stated.
“That’s an objective, but is it an objective that the central bank should be smack into? There’s something wrong with that because what has happened is, you have because of criminals that you know – the government knows the criminals, they are part of them.
“If it wanted to, in a transparent manner, get them, it would get them. But what it has done is it has basically discomfited the citizens, the poor women in the market, the people just barely eking out a living, and now struggling because of the criminality our politics.”
“It does make a lot of sense for us to not be loading bags of money all over the place. But when you think of how the operational plan for this policy has been bungled, it just is appalling.
“And to think that it also happened so close to elections is a double whammy, as the Americans would say.”
