*Says Emefiele is grossly Incompetent…
By Temitope Adelakun
There is an uncanny resemblance between Governor Godwin Emefiele and the lead character in Anezi Okoro’s famous novel, One Week, One Trouble. Like the 1972 novel’s character, Godwin has been hugging negative spokes of the limelight in the past few months. Consequently, many are beginning to wonder, whether he was the same easy going banker they had always known.
In the run-up to the 2015 general elections, rumours swirled and circled about how the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, literally flung open the national treasury for the ruling People’s Democratic Party, PDP, to do as they wished in their failed bid to hold on to power. Speaking at the Seventh Presidential Quarterly Business Forum for Private Sector stakeholders at the State House Conference Centre in Abuja in 2018, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said, “In one single transaction a few weeks to the 2015 elections, N100billion and $295million were just fretted by a few.”
Days later, a source in the presidency source revealed how the CBN got instructions from former President Goodluck Jonathan to move over N100 billion from the CBN to his private residence among other financial malfeasances. Godwin Emefiele was in the saddle. He bent to the whims and caprices of his employers while sacrificing professionalism and patriotism. There were further reports in the media about how Emefiele, in connivance with the National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, who has been in detention for the past three years for diverting the money appropriated for the war against Boko Haram to fund the 2015 election, was arbitrarily releasing money.
Conversely, there are no such reports exactly one month to the very crucial presidential election. Has the CBN governor turned a new leaf? Or, has the anti-corruption campaign of the Buhari administration kept him on the straight and narrow? Alas, none of these is the case. Rather, the CBN Governor has reportedly found a way to completely shut out possibilities of leakages to the media as he is currently cleaning his tracks in preparation for his exit in June. A source in the bank said, “The CBN under Emefiele is mired in an astronomical level of corruption that the media is not talking about or that Nigerians just ignored, or overlooked, which makes it more intriguing.
Now that his tenure expires in June, the wily man however, has no plan to see the tenure out as he plans to use the flimsy excuse, the regular and well-worn script of all corrupt office holders, of poor health and seeking medical attention abroad, to escape Nigeria, without even handing over to the most senior Director General in CBN, pending the appointment of a new substantive Governor.” As part of this plan, Emefiele has been relocating all his immediate family abroad, including his two sons.
Indeed, Emefiele’s tenure has been dogged by allegations of monumental corruption. Consequently, a lot of CBN staff are also complaining about the governor’s attitude towards their welfare, and his undisguised nepotism whereby he prefers to work with only people from his native Delta State. A case in point is that of Mrs Priscilla Eleje, also from Delta State, who Emefiele wants to impose as the Director of Currency in CBN. If he had his way, this will be the first time that the two signatories on the Naira will hail from the same geopolitical zone of the country, South-South.
Due to the allegation of nepotism, the CBN Governor, has reportedly settled the Federal Character Commission, and the House Committee on Federal Character, to turn a blind eye to the unrelenting recruitment of new CBN staff from the South-South, where he hails from, an act that runs afoul of the Federal Character Act. To cover up his tracks, he reportedly gave two employment slots to each member of the House of Representatives. Not forgetting his refusal to pay CBN Contractors; sources said he was actually directed by Aso Rock to hold on to the payments so that contractors won’t deploy such to finance elections of the opposition parties.
For a man who professes Christianity and all its tenets, Emefiele has sadly forgotten the biblical injunction that a worker deserves his pay. Unperturbed, it was gathered that he has however been bluffing and bragging that the media can go ahead and print anything about him after all, his tenure will end June 2019. He may need to be reminded however that the evil men do lives after them.
However, Nigeria’s main opposition candidate, Atiku Abubakar, said he would appoint a new central bank governor and float the naira if he wins next month’s elections.
Godwin Emefiele is not doing a good job, Abubakar said, adding that he’d make the change when the governor’s first term ends in June. “I don’t think he’s pursued the right policies,” Abubakar, 72, said Wednesday in an interview in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos. “We have to have the right people in there.”
Under Emefiele, who was appointed in 2014, Nigeria has tightened capital controls and closely controlled the naira’s value. The governor has consistently said this is the best way to curb inflation and revive manufacturing by discouraging imports. The country now has a system of multiple exchange rates, which several foreign investors have criticized.
