Global economist and former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Professor Charles Soludo, has accused former President Goodluck Jonathan of running the apex bank during his presidency the way former Ugandan President, Idi Amin, ran his country. Similarly, the APC has said the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, “squandered” the resources of the country, as the APC met nothing on the ground to run the country.
In an interview in the current Business Edition of The Interview, Soludo said it was regrettable that in spite of the bank’s statutory independence, it continues to be a victim of high-wire politics, often “electrocuting” the bank’s leadership. According to him, “imagine a scenario where a president can order the CBN to create an intervention fund for national stability and CBN literally ‘prints’ say, N3 trillion, and doles it out cash to the Presidency to prosecute an election campaign or for just about anything he fancies. It is a scary thought.
“We are going down a dangerous path that ruins the economy. I don’t know any other country where such is tolerated, except perhaps what I watched in a movie about Idi Amin and his governor of central bank.
“Recent revelations regarding the ‘arms-gate’ (revelations involving former NSA Sambo Dasuki on $2.1 billion arms scam) and the apparent abuse of the CBN as ATM by the presidency should get reasonable people thinking.”
Since leaving the CBN, Soludo has been a stringent critical voice in the manner the governments of Nigeria have been running the economy. He tackled former Minister of Finance, Olusegun Aganga, putting to shred the former minister’s economic policies which Soludo dismissed as childish economics that would lead the nation to financial meltdown.
Recently at a public lecture, he cut to pieces the Treasury single account policy of the President Buhari government, arguing that lumping all public sector money in the CBN as idle money in the name of TSA was not ‘good economics’.
