President Muhammadu Buhari, may have finally begun to probe two former Governors of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Chukwuma Soludo, and Sanusi Lamido, respectively.
This came as the current Governor of the apex bank, Godwin Emefiele, placed the blame for the current foreign exchange crisis in the country, squarely at the feet of his predecessors.
In an interview in Lagos on Sunday, September 18, Emefiele, said the current forex crisis would have been averted, if Soludo and Sanusi had not adopted measures that resulted in the depletion of the country’s foreign reserves.
Recall, that Soludo was the CBN Governor between 2004 and 2009, after which Sanusi succeeded him.
According to Emefiele, when both men were at the helm of affairs at the apex bank, the price of oil was consistently well above $110 per barrel, and the country had healthy reserves that would have allowed it to invest in critical infrastructure that would boost productivity, and diversify the economy.
He said: “In September 2008, Nigeria’s FX reserve stood at $62 billion; what did we do with $62 billion? At a time when crude oil price was at about N120 per barrel, what did the country do? What we could have done is save the money. If we couldn’t save the money, invest it in infrastructure, invest in industry, invest them in infrastructure and industry that would grow productivity and the wealth of our people.
“But what did we do? I’ll give you an example. The Central Bank of Nigeria of that time, went about licensing class ‘A’, class ‘B’, class ‘C’ bureau-de-change.“For class ‘A’ bureau-de-change, Central Bank was allocating $1 million per week; for class ‘B’ bureau-de-change, Central Bank was allocating $750,000 per week; and for class ‘C’ bureau-de-change, CBN was allocating $500,000 per week to each bureau-de-change, to the extent that between 2005 when the bank started selling dollar cash and 2016 January when we stopped it, the CBN had sold dollar cash of up to $66 billion to BDCs.“In 11 years, CBN allocated $66 billion, averaging $6 billion per year. If this didn’t happen, we would comfortably be having well over $90 billion in our reserve account today, and we will not be struggling to pay our bills today. If we had thought of other ways to utilize our reserves in 2008, when it was as high as $62 billion, perhaps certainly we would not be where we are”.
He further revealed, that when he was CEO of Zenith Bank, he was queried by a Deputy Governor of the CBN, for not selling dollars to BDCs.
“I was called to be queried, that some people in Kano, some people in Port Harcourt, and in Lagos, were calling to say Zenith Bank was not selling dollar cash to bureaux-de-change, but of course the bank didn’t see any serious need to disburse dollar cash to bureaux-de-change at that time. That was what we did with part of our $62 billion,” he stated.
The CBN Governor, who stoutly defended the regulator’s forex policy, especially the forex ban on 41 items, said that the country could not afford to be importing items it has the capacity to manufacture, stressing that the forex ban had already led to the creation of jobs in some sectors.
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