Adams Oshiomhole, Senator representing Edo North, said that the excessive printing of money by the Central Bank of Nigeria under former President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, through the Ways and Means policy, crippled the naira.
Oshiomhole made the statement in a recent interview, comparing Nigeria’s past economic situation to that of Zimbabwe and Idi Amin’s Uganda.
He said, “We are coming from a country that was almost like Zimbabwe or Idi Amin’s Uganda, where he asked the Central Bank governor, ‘Go and print more money for us to share to the people.’
And the governor replied, ‘If we print more money, the Ugandan currency will become like a sheet of paper.’”
“This is what the immediate past CBN governor was doing. In the Senate, we have the record that they printed over ₦31 trillion which they called Ways and Means. You know when the government wants to deceive people they use jargon.
They called it Ways and Means but I can tell you what it means: it means a situation in which the government prints banknotes, not based on what we have earned or any resources, just print banknotes to go and share to the people to meet their money illusion.
It is the result of that excessive printing of banknotes that led to the collapse of the naira,” Oshiomhole said.
The former Edo State governor further stated that “to understand the root cause of the present cost of living and the exchange rate regime, you must trace it and locate it in terms of the excessive amount of banknotes through so-called Ways and Means which the past government created and which this government has eliminated”.
He added that Nigeria was “borrowing everyday the way fish drink water”, adding that it has become President Bola Tinubu’s burden to pay back those loans in order to guarantee the sovereignty of Nigeria.
Leave a Reply