Govs Order States To File A Lawsuit Against Fg Over The Naira Exchange.
The Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) has asked its members to support the legal struggle on the policy against the Federal Government at the top court ahead of the Supreme Court’s hearing on the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) currency redesign policy on Wednesday.
After its meeting on Saturday in Abuja, the NGF released a communiqué yesterday in which it instructed the Attorneys General of the 36 states to study the Supreme Court case in order to combine the state-level legal claims.
Before Kano, Niger, Ondo, and Ekiti states joined the lawsuit last week, the Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara state governments had initially brought the action.
As they left the meeting, the governors said that the CBN’s naira exchange strategy was putting the nation at danger of recession.
The governors, across party lines, criticized CBN over the management of the policy in the communiqué signed by NGF chairman and governor of Sokoto State Aminu Tambuwal, noting that the consequent naira shortage is making life difficult for Nigerians.
They claimed that the central bank was running a “currency confiscation” scheme that was harming Nigerians. The governors also demanded that “the CBN’s intention to stop using the old currency notes be suspended after two deadlines failed to resolve naira shortages nationwide.
The CBN’s justification for this approach, which it defines as being based on a “astronomical growth in the amount of money in circulation,” is not substantiated by its own statistics.
The amount of money in circulation climbed from N1.4 trillion in 2015 to N3.23 trillion in October 2022, according to the CBN. The effect of the enormous Ways & Means advances made by CBN to the Federal Government during this time, as well as the rise in consumer prices, population growth, and the size of the country’s nominal GDP during this time, do not seem to have been taken into account by CBN.
“Given the conditions, it is reasonable to infer one of two conclusions: either the CBN statistics may be inaccurate, or Nigerians may have adapted to a cashless economy extraordinarily successfully.
“Additionally, the number of banknotes produced in exchange so far by the CBN suggests that it greatly overestimated the economy’s real cash requirements, given the huge informal sector in the country.
