Adala Ijamu
Public Forum
Even though 2023 elections seem to be far away, politicians are not leaving anything to chance as they clutch on anything under the sun to salvage their nosediving political careers.
These politicians realized, albeit lately, that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has eclipsed the remnants of their political careers. The enormous reforms in the economy, agriculture, infrastructure and governance eco-system executed by the Buhari’s administration in the last six years have taken them aback.
That alone put these politicians into a sudden overdrive – all in desperate moves to attack, malign and sabotage the Buhari administration.
What started as innocent protests against anti-crime police excesses, later snowballed into pull-blown nationwide subterranean movement tele-guided to effect a forceful change of government through the instrumentality of violent anarchy. Within a week, the EndSARS protests inflicted an unprecedented mass damage in the psyche of the country where security agencies, particularly, the police, were targeted and murdered in cold blood. Critical facilities that include security formations, equipment and social utilities were abundantly vandalized. Multi-billion naira worth of private and organizational property were looted and destroyed. The single aim of all these was to incite Nigerians against the Buhari administration through mass action.
Thankfully, all these premeditated chaos were brought under control, and the forces of light defeated the forces of darkness. Having failed in realizing that devilish plans, these undesirable elements turned their antics to the governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, Chief Godwin Emefiele. They sponsored some bread and butter civil society organizations to stage press conferences and rallies shamefully demanding Buhari to sack the governor, or the CBN governor voluntary resigns for no known reason.
These campaigns of calumny coincided with the drastic policy regime embarked upon by Chief Emefiele, that include among others, the new foreign exchange regime. The CBN governor took the bull by the horn and stopped funding of Bureau de Change operators. This raised their angry antenna.
It is an open secret that these attacks are being bankrolled by some highly-placed politicians who are also sponsoring terrorism, whose illicit acts have been uncovered and shutdown as the apex bank upped its ante against money laundering and terrorist financing.
These well-calculated evil machinations, bankrolled by powerful elements involved in illicit and terrorist financing were unleashed in phases, the first being the well-funded media campaign executed by some faceless youths and socio-cultural organizations.
Financial analysts and economists have, for years, realized the tremendous reforms the CBN governor brought to the country’s financial and economic sectors through various programmes and policies, with eNaira being the latest.
In an attempt to save the naira, for instance, the CBN has issued at least 21 policies and directives between September 2020 and September 2021.
In August 2020, Emefiele resolved to go tough on exporters who were guilty of forex non-repatriation. This was another effort to tackle the prevalent forex crisis in the country by increasing forex liquidity. The CBN ordered banks to submit the names, addresses, and Bank Verification Numbers (BVNs) of all the exporters who had failed to repatriate their export proceeds, for necessary ‘action’. These angered these politicians who fleece the country.
When faced with rising cases of forex hoarding and funding of militant and terrorist groups, Emefiele swooped to action by taking deliberate and albeit drastic policies in arresting those maladies with catastrophic effects on the security architecture of the country.
After the CBN’s monetary policy rate (MPR) meeting in July 2021, Emefiele braved the odds and banned Bureau De Change (BDC) operators from accessing forex, and also said some them have become conduit for illegal financial flows working with corrupt people to conduct money laundering in Nigeria.
“They have turned themselves away from their objectives. They are now agents that facilitate graft and corruption in the country. We cannot continue with the bad practices that are happening at the BDC market,” the CBN chief said.
He said the depreciating value of the national currency was partly because of prevailing ownership of several BDCs by the same promoters to procure multiple forex from the central bank.
Having being defeated woefully, these prophets of doom are now back with a new trick: that the Anchor Borrowers Programme has failed and therefore needs to be scrapped. These selfish narratives have already being funneled into the mainstream media ostensibly to mislead the gullible public.
It is no surprising that Emefiele’s Anchor Borrowers Programme was targeted. Fact is that ABP is Buhari’s administration one of the most visible and successful programme which impact is being felt across the length and breadth of the country.
It is the greatest fallacy to say that ABP is wasteful intervention when in reality the country was saved by the same programme.
It is public knowledge that prior to 2015, Nigeria’s local production was 2.5 mts /hectare, but now rose to 7-9 mts/hectare. Also, before Buhari’s election in 2015, our annual rice production was 2.5-3 million mts, but now rose to 9 million mts.
Courtesy ABP, the number of integrated rice mills increased from mere 11 in 2015 to about 140 about 400 medium and over 200,000 small scale mills.
In terms of farming alone, there are about 1.5 million rice farmers six years ago, but the number has transformed to over 20 million now.
In fiscal terms, before Buhari’s coming, the federal government spent huge money to stop rural urban migration now ABP make urban- rural migration cost free.
This is not to mention how ABP saved Nigeria a whooping sum of N369 billion per annum, while the country consumes N1.5 billion worth of rice every day. This breakthrough has saved the country the challenge of sourcing forex or devaluing our currency to finance this monstrous import wage bill.
Official data indicate that the ABP has added six million metric tons to rice supply in the country and created nearly six million direct jobs in a year; at the same time, about two million direct jobs are created in a cropping season. By this alone, since Nigeria has three cropping seasons in a year, all of them fully funded by the CBN. These jobs are restricted to only the production value chain of rice, and not include millions other jobs created in the processing, packaging, transport, marketing sectors of the rice ecosystem.
While it is an open secret these desperate politicians whose fraudulent sources of income have been blocked by Buhari’s administration won’t rest on their evil oars, it is however gratifying that it is not enough to destroy a programme simply because it is facing some difficulties in recovering loans from some of its clients.
In essence, what these politicians are saying is that Nigeria should close all its money deposit banks for the fact that some of the loans they give out have become toxic. The CBN, we are aware, is devising new measures of recovering its loans. We can’t throw the baby with the bath water. This is not an attack on ABP or CBN, it’s an attack on Buhari. We expect worse attacks as 2023 draws near.