The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, has blamed former military dictator Ibrahim Babangida for the downward trend in the value of the naira. 

Mr Emefiele made his comments to President Muhammadu Buhari at the State House, Abuja, on Monday, during the official launch of Nigeria’s digital currency, the eNaira. 

“Please recall that since the advent of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) led Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in 1986, and the introduction of the Second Tier Foreign Exchange (SFEM) market, the Naira has been on a one-way free fall from parity to the US Dollar in 1984 to over N410/USD today,” Mr Emefiele said.

According to the governor of Nigeria’s apex bank, “Some 35 years later, we have not been able to achieve the many promises and objectives of that programme.”

In 1985, Mr Babangida made an agreement with the IMF to receive new loans from the World Bank. As a condition for granting the loan, the IMF called for Nigeria to devalue its currency and end the practice of subsidising petroleum products for consumers.

Mr Emefiele also added in the speech that Nigeria possesses ‘strong’ external foreign reserves, saying that it currently stands at over $40 billion. 

He referred to the national currency trading at 410 to the dollar, the official exchange set by the apex bank, without regarding the easily accessible parallel markets where the naira is pushing N600 to the dollar since the ban on foreign exchange transactions with BDCs. 

Mr Emefiele also blamed the devaluation of the Naira on the country’s import dependency, saying that it had “wiped out most of our production and manufacturing bases and exported all our jobs in the process.”

The governor urged Mr Buhari to create a conducive economic environment for domestic productions and non-oil exports to encourage Nigerians, not acknowledging the negative and short-term economic policies enforced by the current administration, increasing insecurity and the ongoing unemployment crisis in the country. 

“We must return to an employment-led growth anchored on productivity and rewarding producers of local goods, services, innovation and new technologies,” he said.

According to Mr Emefiele, “If you consume cheap imports and export our jobs, we will make you pay dearly; but if you produce locally – with little or no foreign inputs beyond machinery, we will support you, and the markets will reward you abundantly.”