Senator Adams Oshiomhole, who represents the Edo North Senatorial District, has stated that the naira was weakened by the Central Bank of Nigeria’s excessive money production under former President Muhammadu Buhari’s government.
Oshiomhole made this claim on Saturday during an interactive session and meeting of the Progressive Governors Forum in Benin City, Edo State.
The senator likened reckless naira printing under the former president’s watch to what happened during the regime of former Ugandan President Idi Amin.
“We are coming from a country that was almost like Zimbabwe or Idi Amin’s Uganda, where he asked the Central Bank Governor to ‘go and print more money for us to share to the people’. And the Governor said, if we print more money, Uganda currency will be like a sheet of paper,” he said.
The former governor of Edo State and president of the Nigeria Labour Congress, or NLC, claims that in order to identify the underlying cause of the current exchange rate regime and cost of living, you must track down the excessive quantity of banknotes using the so-called Ways and Means that the previous administration established.
He emphasised that it is now President Bola Tinubu’s responsibility to repay those loans in order to ensure Nigeria’s sovereignty, saying that Nigeria is borrowing money on a daily basis in the same way that fish drink water.
“They called it Ways and Means, but I can tell you what it means: it means a situation in which the government prints banknotes, not based on what we have earned or any resources, just print banknotes to go and share to the people to meet their money illusion. It is the result of that excessive printing of banknotes that led to the collapse of the naira,” he added.
