27th February, 2024
By Taiwo Okanlawon
The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Olayemi Cardoso, said he and his team are not responsible for Nigeria’s current economic woes but part of the solution.
Cardoso stated this while responding to a question about whether the CBN is responsible for the current economic challenges faced by Nigerians at the first Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting in Abuja on Tuesday.
The CBN boss, however, said the CBN is taking the necessary steps to get the country’s fiscal and monetary health back to normal.
In his words, “I laugh at that question but it’s not a laughing matter and I think it is very important for Nigerians to understand that my Central Bank team and I are not responsible for the woes Nigeria has today — we’re part of the solution. All we can do is do the difficult things to make a bad situation better. Nigeria does not have the wiggle room to get things wrong.”
“We are determined to ensure that we work hard to get out of the mess that Nigeria is in. We assumed responsibility in a time of crisis of confidence; there was a crisis of confidence and you may all want to go to bed and wish that crisis of confidence was not there but it was, and we can’t turn back the clock.
“All we can do is do the difficult things to make a bad situation better and I do believe that the efforts that we are making are beginning to bring back confidence because to be frank, without confidence in your business, you are not going to get far.”
Other important indices, such as the Cash Reserves Ratio (CRR) and Liquidity Ratio, stayed constant throughout the time despite these aggressive efforts, with the CRR remaining at 32.5 percent and the Liquidity Ratio at 30.0 percent.
Cardoso also raised apprehensions regarding the transparency of transactions facilitated by Binance Nigeria.
Cardoso revealed that an astonishing $26 billion has been processed through Binance Nigeria over the past four years, with concerns arising from the inability to adequately identify the sources and users of these funds.
Cardoso highlighted the significant volume of transactions conducted through Binance Nigeria, emphasising the challenges associated with identifying the origin and destination of these funds.
“We are concerned that certain practices go on that indicate illicit flows, going through a number of these entities and suspicious flows and best in the case of Binance. In the last one year alone, 26 billion US dollars, have passed through Binance Nigeria, from sources and users we cannot adequately identify.”