When you are not in a person's shoes, you do not understand what they are going through and why they had to make certain decisions. This is my thought when I think of the just suspended Central Bank of Nigeria governor. In the last 9 years, Godswill Emefiele has been the governor and commander of the banking sector of the country which we will refer to as the heart beat of the country. He is very well powerful than the finance minister and has been able to boycott so many agencies and government bodies.
For me, in the last 9 years, we had a governor who was in his own way trying to either save the country or sabotage it for personal gains. I am not sure of his intentions because I am not in the position to know what his intentions are. While he has been suspended, he was actually supposed to serve for 10 years (at 5 years per tenure). Emefiele actually became the governor of the Central Bank when the Naira was about 300 compared to the dollar. At this time, we were very concerned and a lot of people started to speculate that the governor was going to bring the price of naira to the dollar to 180 naira per 1 dollar but this isn't the story as of today that he is no longer the CBN governor. Currently, the price of Naira to the dollar is 760 naira to a dollar on the parallel market, and 430 naira to a dollar from the central bank. This is a failure based on my own judgment and the expectation of lots of Nigerians.
As I said, you cannot understand what he was going through because you were not in his shoes. In his pursuit to make the price back to normal and to have a singular currency exchange market, he decided to do a lot of things. Normally, a Nigeria debit visa and master card can perform up to $1000 worth of transactions, as at the time of Emefiele becoming the governor but as of today, the Naira card cannot perform any international transaction. Policies were created, and the entire ability to use a local card for foreign transactions became impossible. He said that the country wasn't making enough money to keep its foreign reserve full and people spending outside the country was the country paying for whatever they needed at the CBN rate. This might have looked like a good thing, but the after-effect was different. People started looking for the dollar from the parallel market and this led to a spike in the price of the dollar against the naira.
He also reduced the amount people could pay for their studies abroad, and this made a lot of students handicapped, so many people had to use the parallel market to get dollars and use other means to send money to their loved ones. At some point, in 2020, SEC in Nigeria declared cryptocurrency as legal and Bitcoin as a security, but then the CBN governor decided to send a memo asking all banks to close down all accounts found to be purchasing cryptocurrency. So many of my bank accounts suffered from that policy and are still suffering from it. This act also caused the dollar to gain weight against the naira and people started to wonder what was going on.
A lot of policies were made such as being charged for everything you did at the bank and even being overcharged for some things that were not meant to be while sending the money to the central bank. The central bank in recent times redesigned the currency but then gave people a short time to swap the currency. A lot of people believed that this was a political attack because it happened around the just-concluded election this year. A lot of Nigerians were in severe pain over this and didn't know what to do. These policies and many more policies were made that affected a lot of people. In recent times, the CBN governor has been alledged of fraud, and he is being investigated. This is the reason why the president has suspended him pending when the investigation would be over.
For me, while I cannot say if he was doing these things to build the country's finance or destroying the country's finance but I beleive that most of his decisions were supposedly aimed at making the naira stronger but how will the naira be strong when there are two types of market instead of one. If the banks had dollar available for people's transaction, the parallel market would not exist. So, I feel he didn't do the right thing but then, he is out of office for now. What do you think about his monetary policies?