Emefiele: Why They Fight Him

By Jackson Ugbechie

Have you noticed something lately about Godwin Emefiele, the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN? Perhaps, you haven’t.

But if you check the headlines, you would see a resurgence in criticisms of his leadership style.

You would observe an emerging pattern in a section of the media, all trying to malign the central banker who has summoned the boldness to tell Nigerians the truth.

Long before Nigeria suffered a huge drop in crude oil receipts, Emefiele has been crying like the Biblical lone voice in the wilderness, forewarning Nigerians to change their lifestyle of living off imported and exotic items.

He had argued that for every imported item we indulge our lavish lifestyle in, it takes a toll on our foreign reserve. And he took steps to block the leakages.

He moved against dollar merchants. Emefiele shut the illicit business of forex speculators. Those who apply and obtain dollars for production of tomato puree but end up importing same.

Those who obtain dollars in huge sums from CBN to produce toothpick but end up using same to import toothpick.

Those who obtain forex to import machinery to boost rice production using their farms as fronts and collateral but deploy it to import cars and rice. For these categories of forex speculators, Emefiele was bad business.

Yet, while Emefiele represents bad business for the forex merchants and their foreign collaborators, the CBN governor represents good business for Nigeria and Nigerians.

And if you notice that the criticisms against Emefiele heightened after his deserved reappointment by President Muhammadu Buhari for another five years, you would begin to understand why.

Those who have worked so hard to kill our local industries, be it the once booming textile industry, agriculture especially grains production, fertilizer production among other items that we could easily produce at home, are incensed that Emefiele was reappointed for yet another five long years.

They just can’t imagine how they could put up with this shrewd central bank governor who has come to pour sand in their garri.

Putting up with Emefiele’s fiscal responsibility demands is unimaginable for them. So, they must discredit the man and his mission.

But Nigerians should by now know that without Emefiele’s ban on the importation of over 40 items about two years ago, the nation’s foreign reserve would have been completely depleted.

Without his insistence on local production, there would never have been an assortment of locally-produced rice gracing our tables. Without his foresight to ban these items, the remnants of our textile factories would have completely disappeared.

But today, thanks to his restriction in forex allocation, his preference to finance production rather than consumption, there would not have been the revival now happening in the textile industry, in the agriculture value chain and in the drastic reduction in importation of grains from all over the world.

Emefiele sure deserves garland not the guillotine treatment that some unpatriotic elements and their foreign collaborators have decided to give to a man who only wants Nigerians to consume what they produce.

The latest media spin from Emefiele detractors is the unfounded, rather disingenuous tale that he was working to guarantee immunity for himself. This is the height of unreason.

It’s even grossly unfortunate that an elite body of the status of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group, (NESG), is the one flying such flag of unreason. This simply mocks logic because all the issues raised about Emefiele weaving a coat of immunity for himself through the revision of the BOFIA Act are baseless.

This is rather alarming because an elite group like the NESG is populated by highly enlightened men and women versed in the rudiments of basic rules of engagement and knowledgeable in all laws and associated statutes governing statutory bodies like the CBN.