Shehu Sani, a former senator representing Kaduna central,
says President Muhammadu Buhari has limited knowledge of economics.
Speaking on Tuesday on Arise TV, Sani said the naira
redesign policy has brought suffering to Nigerians.
He said there should have been a wide consultation beyond
getting approval from the president before the introduction of the policy,
noting that the country is in “a man-made economic turbulence”.
“But what is wrong in this policy is that there should have
been a wide consultation. It’s not simply about the CBN governor going to the
president to get his approval over an issue that I believe that the president
of the country has limited knowledge of because he is not an economist,” Sani
said.
“Secondly, I expected that before such a decision was made,
there could have been a wide consultation with the national assembly and also
the civil societies. By doing that, you are carrying the whole country along
and then ideas will be crystalised and then problems that may arise will be
predicted and then they can be solved.
“But for now, all that we have known was that the governor
of the central bank has made it very clear that all he needed was the approval
of Mr President and then he got it and now everyone is paying the price.
“Well, to be fair, if this redesigning of the naira and the
cashless policy is about combatting or containing vote-buying, that is a very
good initiative. But the fallout or the consequences of it on the other side is
that people are suffering, and you don’t know which of the notes to accept.
“They will tell you today you can use the old notes and you
go to buy things the money is not available and if you have to use the cashless
system, sometimes the alert doesn’t come in time and as such, the whole
transaction in the country has become a problem.
“Even our communities in the border areas now are using
currencies like the Cefa and other currencies from other countries and then as
we have heard people in rural areas have resorted to trade by barter. So, we
have just gotten ourselves into an economic turbulence that is man-made that is
designed and then it could have been avoided.
“There was a time when we raised our voice and said you can
redesign the naira, you can implement cashless policy, but why don’t you get
ideas from the civil society, from traders, from marketers, from
industrialists, from the economists, from the general public so that we would
all be carried along and then everyone will now give his own input on how these
issues can be tackled.
“And how can the people that have paraded themselves as
experienced in managing finance, banks, and whatever get us to this kind of
situation?”
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