Headline : OPINION: Our central bank governor is angry. Really?

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OLAYEMI Cardoso is the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). I was made to understand that he came to the job with intimidating credentials. Some of his traducers will dispute this by saying that his hands-on banking experience is thin and that he was essentially a once-upon-a-time chairman of an international bank with only one branch. And that one branch shared a building with the bank’s headquarters somewhere in Victoria Island in Lagos. I think the name of that institution is City Bank. It has to be acknowledged though that it was, still is, a global brand. But Cardoso’s experience, whether thin or thick, did not fetch him the top CBN job. What did it for him was his connection to Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He had worked for Tinubu in the president’s previous incarnation as the governor of Lagos state between 1999-2007. Cardoso is not alone in this regard. Virtually everybody who is anybody and who is occupying any significant position in this regime has been a ‘boy’ or acolyte of the president.

Cardoso as the CBN governor has done a few other things since he was installed to succeed the former hack who occupied that office. Godwin Emefiele was a disaster who in addition to economic management ineptitude and administrative failings diminished the office of the CBN governor almost beyond redemption. Emefiele, it was, who as a sitting CBN governor made a grab for the presidency of Nigeria. He threw his hat into the ring in the contest for the presidential ticket of the All Progressives Congress (APC) political party. He was a card-carrying though closet member of the ruling party. The man who reappointed him to office for a second term, former president, Maj.-Gen Muhammadu Buhari, said much later that Emefiele did not break any law. Buhari, who turned out to be Nigeria’s affliction, may yet be right but in which sane clime would a serving central bank helmsman dive in such a reckless manner into the murky waters of partisan politics and walk away scot-free. Well, he has not walked away unscatted though he appears to be facing political persecution from Tinubu who appears to feel that the ex-CBN governor threw huddles on his way to Aso Rock Villa through the sudden currency recoloration in the heat of the 2023 campaigns.

Expectedly, Cardoso had his hands full in terms of house cleaning when he assumed office. In addition, he had a couple of petty bills to pay including the backlog of unremitted foreign currency revenues of international airlines. Apart from minor distractions such as the above and occasional claims of accretion to the country’s foreign reserves (up to $40bn now from about $36bn though no mention is ever made of any portion of the sum that may be encumbered), the new sheriff in the apex bank has preoccupied himself solely with raising interest rates. For Cardoso, mindless raising of interest rates with its deleterious effects on other areas of the economy is the only tool in his box to rein in galloping inflation which now stands at over 33% (food inflation is actually about 40%}, and arrest the rapid and precipitous decline in the value of the Naira. The current street value of the Naira is $1/N1,740. For the 2024 national budget the federal government projected that $1USD would exchange for N800. The projection was off target. Even the economically illiterate knew then that the benchmark was a non-starter. The $1/N1,400 provided for in the 2025 budget may still fall through the cracks. In spite of Cardoso’s best efforts in digging in neither inflation nor exchange rate stability has been achieved. And he has been on these for one and a half years. Just like the chief executive officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), Mele Kyari, and the completion of refineries’ turnaround maintenance, Cardoso has missed all the targets he had set for himself on inflation reduction and Naira stability.

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