By Chesa Chesa
A former presidential candidate and Chieftain of the All Progressive Congress (APC), Mr. Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim, says it is time for the Federal Government to stop the free float of the Naira in exchange against other currencies.
This is against the background that for some time now, the “floating” of the Naira by the Bola Tinubu administration has depreciated the national currency, such that it changed for about N1,900 to one United States Dollar.
In a statement released by his media office in Abuja on Thursday, Olawepo-Hashim explained that “It would be delusional to manage Nigeria’s foreign exchange regime with the expectation that the market would correct itself when the Nigeria market is controlled by different criminal gangs.”
According to him, “it is also time for real Central Bankers to assume control of the Central Bank rather than commercial bankers and even elements at the fringes of commercial banking who have hijacked the management of our monetary policies in the past two decades.”
In view of allegations that bank Chief Executives have become foreign exchange speculators, Olawepo-Hashim argued that “no serious nation in the world would continue to manage its affairs on the basis of failed recommendations by officials of Brettonwoods institutions who have consistently misadvised Nigeria to continuously devalue its currency for about 38 years.”
He stated that “my generation stoutly resisted these packages in the great Anti-SAP revolts of 1989. The present variant of the market allocation is the most extreme ever experienced which is seeing naira exchange at N1900 to a dollar compared to N8 to a dollar which we resisted fiercely in 1989.”
He also maintained that having removed subsidy on Petroleum products with all the very hard consequences, it is bad economic planning to allow naira to go on the free fall as devaluation would continuously erode any fiscal gain of subsidy removal, necessitating another round of subsidy and subsidy removal which the economy at 32% inflation cannot absorb.
Olawepo-Hashim also emphasized that the much sought after investors whether local or foreign would be hard to find in a season of currency volatility and high inflation eroding purchasing power of consumers, and therefore called for an urgent need to stabilise the economy and tame volatility through “Commonsense Economics.”
