Former Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole has accused the immediate-past President Muhammad Buhari during his time in the country’s saddle of printing N31trillion for the purpose of sharing them under the ways and means policy of the then Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN.
Oshiomhole now a Senator, dropped this bombshell while speaking at the Progressives Governors Forum’s meeting and interactive session in Benin, the Edo State, on Saturday.
The Senator, representing Edo North, said the financial indiscretion is similar to what transpired in Zimbabwe and Uganda under the junta government of Idi Amin.
He further attributed the present collapse of the naira to the financial misjudgement.
“We are coming from a country that was almost like Zimbabwe or Idi Amin’s Uganda where he asked the Central Bank governor ‘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’.
“This is what the immediate past CBN governor was doing. In the Senate, we have the record that they printed over ₦31 trillion which they called Ways and Means,” he alleged.
“You know when the government wants to deceive people they use jargon. 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,” he added.
Oshiomhole stressed the “excessive printing of banknotes” was the root cause of the naira’s steep depreciation, saying, “To understand the root cause of the present cost of living and the exchange rate regime, you must trace it and locate it in terms of the excessive amount of banknotes through so-called Ways and Means which the past government created and which this government has eliminated.”
Before he added: “Nigeria was borrowing every day the way fish drink water,” and it has now become Tinubu’s responsibility “to pay back those loans in order to guarantee the sovereignty of Nigeria.”