After a thorough review of the economic challenges confronting the country, the lawmaker representing Edo North senatorial district, Adams Oshiomhole, has attributed the excessive printing of the country’s currency by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) by the former President, Muhammadu Buhari’s administration through the Ways and Means policy.
Oshiomhole added that the policy led by the former CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, crippled the naira, a development that weakened the country’s currency against that of other nations.
He made the allegation at a Progressive Governors Forum’s Meeting and Interactive Session in Benin City, Edo State, on Saturday.
The Ways and Means provision allows the Federal Government to borrow from the CBN if it needs emergency finance to fund delayed government expected cash receipts of fiscal deficits.
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 with the people’. And the governor said, ‘if we print more money, Uganda currency will be 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 prints banknotes to go and share with 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.
In 2024, the Senate inaugurated an ad-hoc committee to investigate the Ways and Means and the Anchor Borrowers Programme of the apex bank.
