Bereft of any spin, what the CBN, with the very robust leading (not backing) of the Buhari administration, is doing with the Naira redesign should be more aptly called Naira Confiscation Policy rather than Naira Exchange Policy.
By Tiko Okoye
An African proverb draws attention to the fact that there is a way a man could legitimately be eating his own food that would cause observers and passers-by to have a sneaking suspicion that he stole the food. The commonest telltale clue is the indecent haste with which he is snaffling and snarfing up all the food morsels with a sneering/snippy expression on his face.
Nowhere is this proverb more evidential than in the manner the duo of President Muhammadu Buhari and CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele have been superintending the naira redesign policy. Nigeria isn’t certainly rediscovering the wheel. Many nations, including Nigeria, have seamlessly implemented domestic currency exchanges before now. Bereft of any spin, what the CBN, with the very robust leading (not backing) of the Buhari administration, is doing should be more aptly called Naira Confiscation Policy rather than Naira Exchange Policy.
This is why many are increasingly saying that an otherwise well-intentioned monetary policy transformed into a nightmare for hard-pressed Nigerians because the currency swap was unveiled in an indecent haste with the malicious purpose of making the ruling party and its candidates for various elections look bad. It hasn’t really mattered that the president in power belongs to the same party because the word on the street is that those reportedly remote-controlling the ugly events from deep inside Aso Villa are not politicians and owe unalloyed allegiance not to our nation and her constitution but to power.
The master puppeteers were initially able to get away with their gambit because a significant proportion of people chose to not care as long as the electoral ambitions of their political “enemies” perceived to be the targets are dealt a fatal blow and given a bruised and bloodied nose.
Frankly speaking, most of us in the South who have been pro-PDP since 1999, prior to the coming of Peter Obi on the platform of the Labour Party, loathe APC with a passion. So, we are simply lampooning the justices for giving what we perceive in our judgement to be a lifeline to the party and its presidential flagbearer over the matter of the naira redesign policy.
Why it never occurred to the policy formulators and us in the first place that a currency swap is more like a marathon than a 100-meter sprint beggars belief. An Igbo adage posits that no one needs to announce to the crowd in a market that a war has started. We now all know better that a trap set to ensnare one is actually set to emasculate all.
Talk of a country with a relatively high under-banked and underserved rural population – culminating in a relatively high proportion of financially excluded and financially illiterate persons – displaying a dismally low uptake in digital finance – particularly banking app – pregnant women, nursing mothers, families with a large number of kids and daily wage earners, crazily bearing the brunt of a vengeful and mismanaged policy.
The irony is that if bandits can be brandishing truckloads of redesigned currencies in their hideouts – even as law-abiding citizens are gnashing their teeth – the supposed target or targets of the policy must have equally used their enormous influence to stockpile the new banknotes in safe houses. What’s even worse is that the current plight of the teeming masses has made them more cheaply and readily susceptible to the gimmicks of stomach. So, what are we really talking about?
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Enter the three APC governors of Kaduna, Kogi and Zamfara and the exparte interim order they procured from the Supreme Court to ostensibly extend the deadline for the naira swap. Rather than appreciate that the short-term relief was in the best interest of the greatest number of suffering Nigerians, a minority but very vociferous body of critics began to disparage the justices with unpalatable and unprintable epithets.
Many among the critics dismissed the justices as “purchasable illiterate bandits who have taken judicial rascality to the high heavens” and “not familiar with lex situs and what an Act of Parliament stood for.” They further accused the Supreme Court justices of “no longer (being) interested in de lege ferenda, which is the purpose of justice (aka the ‘spirit’) over technicalities and issues of law (aka the ‘letter’).”
These jankara traducers declared ex-cathedral that the justices “have no powers to overrule an Act of Parliament” and that their role is solely to “interpret the meaning and import of the CBN Act, and give force to its implementation.”
Despite the highfalutin, legalistic mumbo-jumbo they are bandying about, the hollowness of their thought process is easily demonstrated by an inability to identify the contradiction in their statements. First, they say the justices should focus on the purpose of the law rather than the technicality. In other words, they want the justices to focus more on the bigger picture of what the lawmakers intended, while focusing less on the actual letter. But in another breadth, they want the justices to “interpret the meaning and import of the CBN Act, and give force to its implementation.”
Of a truth, the desirability of social or fundamental justice has been – and still remains – a raging debate between two opposing camps all around the world. One major school of thought contends that the court should aggressively use the law to enthrone an equitable justice – judicial activism. Its leading lights are late Gani Fawehinmi and late Alao Aka-Bashorun.
The other major school – judicial fundamentalism – is best represented by late Rotimi Williams and Kehinde Sofola. Members argue that considering the separation of powers between the three arms of government, the judiciary should cease and desist from interpreting the law outside the parameters provided by the actual letter of law, as doing otherwise would mean that it is encroaching on the right strictly reserved for the legislature to make laws. Just as the legislature cannot interpret the laws it makes, the judiciary cannot enact the laws it adjudicates.
It is very important to emphasize that the interlocutory injunction was not based on the merits of the case. That would be determined at the hearing of the Motion on Notice when all parties would have their day in court to argue the facts and points of law.
I can still understand, but definitely disapprove of, the hubris written and circulated by ordinary folks, but to have lawyers like those at the CBN Legal Department aver as they did that the order should be ignored because the justices don’t understand what an Act of Parliament means and that the right parties were excluded from the suit constitutes a problem of mind-boggling complexity.
For crying out loud, what they did wasn’t just a harmless judicial review but a deliberate plot to subject the apex court to opprobrium and overheat the polity when they know quite well that the only available course of action is to promptly file an appeal asking the justices to vacate the order and cease from further hearing the lawsuit based on concrete points of law.
That these lawyers and the rented crowd that supposedly staged a ‘protest’ at the main gate of the CBN head office demanding that the top management disobey the Supreme Court order were primarily driven by partisan politics is evidenced by the reality that the same people screaming the loudest about the sanctity of the CBN Act were missing in action when then-President Goodluck Jonathan overlooked the autonomy of the apex bank and the guaranteed tenure of its governor to sack Sanusi Lamido Sanusi from office.
I remain fully persuaded that the National Judicial Council – acting in concert with the Professional Disciplinary Committee of the NBA – should sanction erring lawyers for mindlessly striving to enthrone lawlessness and the emergence of an anarchical Hobbesian state that is in no one’s interest. Let’s just allow the justices to execute their statutory function without let or hindrance.
Despite the resolutions of the Council of State and the Nigeria Governors Forum, the counsel of the World Bank/IMF and the Supreme Court interim order, the Presidency – with the apex bank in tow – will continue to act like the housefly that failed to heed advice when the corpse was being buried in the grave. Bereft of a miracle, I foresee the parties in question continue to obey any court orders in disobedience.
They would publicly assert their willingness to obey orders but thwart the same orders by making compliance impossible. For example, banks have remained closed during this period without the apex bank invoking the sanctions as provided in the Banking and Other financial Institutions Act (BOFIA) on deposit-taking financial institutions that close their premises without an approval in writing by the apex bank. Who is fooling who?