The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has said that financial institutions in the country are in “very good condition”.
This was stated by CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, who was represented by the Acting Director, Corporate Communications Department, CBN, Osita Nwanisobi at a sensitisation programme with the tag, ‘Promoting financial stability and economic development’.
He said that there was no cause for alarm concerning the state of Nigeria’s financial system and that the sensitisation programme was to dispel such “rumours”.
He explained, “The fair is targeted at keeping the public apprised and let them know the policies, programmes and interventions of the bank and how it benefits the people.
“Also the sensitisation is aimed at also disabusing all rumours being peddled about distress in the system, there is nothing like that.
“We want Nigerians to know that we carry out “banking examinations” and the results show that our banks are in very good condition and our financial system is stable, resilient, safe and sound. We want Nigerians to know that there is no iota of truth whatsoever in these rumours.
“This sensitisation is part of ways to engage the people so as to understand how our policies, programmes and interventions are affecting them and as well as create a veritable platform to discuss and understand their challenges too through their responses and feedbacks.
“Like the presenter from Consumer Protection said, these are basically based on complaints by individuals ( customer’s) that oftentimes there have been issues on the issue of charges and other matters.
“What we do is that whenever we get these complaints, they are thoroughly investigated, if they are found to be true, the CBN makes sure that these customers are properly refunded and we have so far recovered 89 billion naira.”
Touching on the subject of cryptocurrency, Nwanisobi differentiated the unregulated issuance of cryptocurrencies by “unknown entities” from that which will be created by the CBN.
He referenced the volatility of popular cryptocurrencies whose prices were affected by “a simple tweet by one man”.
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The “man” is an allusion to businessman Elon Musk, whose tweets have been widely agreed to crash and give meteoric boosts to bitcoin prices.
Nwanisobi clarified, “Let me make it clear, cryptocurrencies are issued by unknown entities, no one knows who they are, nobody regulates them, nobody knows what they do, rather all they do is to issue the currencies and we( Nigerians too) have seen what happened on a simple tweet by one man.
”This is completely different from the digital currency that the CBN wants to issue, they would be under regulation by the Apex bank. So it would be regulated and can be used for monetary policy purposes and that’s a huge difference.”
