The Northern Elders Forum (NEF) said that President Muhammadu Buhari is unwilling to rein in the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, so that old and new ₦200, ₦500, and ₦1,000 notes can coexist for the next six months to alleviate the masses’ suffering.
The group also claimed that the CBN’s naira redesign policy, along with the resulting cash crunch, demarkets the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the upcoming February 25 and March 11, 2023 general elections.
NEF spokesman Hakeem Baba-Ahmed stated this on Channels Television’s special election program which was monitored by BizWatch Nigeria.
He said the President should not have allowed this kind of “fiasco” to come into play in the last days of his eight-year administration and on the “eve of an election when you are actually campaigning to have your own party voted for’.
“This money thing is a major demarketing thing for the APC,” Baba-Ahmed said.
“If the worst enemy of APC had design strategy for them to lose this election, he couldn’t have chosen a better fiasco around the reprinting of the naira.”
He claims that the informal sector of the economy has been destroyed in recent weeks due to a lack of liquid cash.
The NEF spokesman said, “There is a lot of anger and to see a situation where the President rather appears unwilling or incapable of reining in Emefiele and say, ‘Listen, perhaps we can allow the old naira and the new naira co-exist for the next six months’.
“President Buhari apparently doesn’t listen to anybody. Emefiele says I will do what I should do because the President has got my back. And Nigerians are saying we know the governor of the CBN is not who is doing all these; it is the President.
“If the President doesn’t want all this suffering and considers the other options, the governor of the CBN won’t get away with these things he is getting away with.”
