Agenda for economic recovery and prosperity | The Guardian Nigeria

In view of the seemingly difficult national economic situation widely painted by the Federal Government, it is necessary to always bear in mind that Nigeria became and has stayed poor because of the wrong policy choices by the political, fiscal and monetary leadership as indeed the double-dealing International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank advisers readily retort self-defensively even though the Bretton Woods institutions force the government choices behind the scenes. Hence it is appropriate to examine the core poverty-deepening policy choice by government by recalling that on August 7, 2007, the Central Bank of Nigeria publicly presented the Strategic Agenda for the Naira (SAN) for implementation. Admitting CBN’s dereliction of its responsibilities until then, the then apex bank governor said, “The Central Bank intends to give greater emphasis to the most important function of central banks everywhere in the world, namely, to issue legal tender currency and defend its value (domestically by ensuring low inflation and externally by ensuring appropriate and stable exchange rate regime).’’ Among the expected fruits were laying the monetary foundation for, and achieving a prosperous economy that would become Africa’s financial hub with the naira as the reference currency while the country would become one of the world’s 20 largest economies by 2020. Sadly, the apex bank, nay, Nigeria missed the set objectives by the target year. Instead, by May 2018, the country became the world’s poverty capital where double-digit inflation alone in 2020 pushed seven million Nigerians into extreme poverty according to the World Bank.

Disappointingly, the fate of the Strategic Agenda for the Naira, it has turned out, hung on the observation by the Attorney-General that former President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua had not received beforehand a procedural request for presidential approval of the included purely cosmetic reform regarding the redenomination of the naira. As a result the projected benefits of the SAN were and have remained suspended till date. So that effectively became the government policy choice. Just assume one of the three apex bank governors in the last 14 years either subsequently requested unsuccessfully for presidential approval of naira redenomination or they made no request. By implication, that Federal Government policy choice has led those three CBN governors to knowingly deprive Nigerians (inclusive of the three tiers of government) of the most important function of a central bank together with the related duties. Yet it was (is) binding  not just on the CBN governors but on the various presidents and National Assembly (NASS) alike for the relevant duties to be performed as enshrined in the CBN Act  2007, the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007 and the yearly Appropriation Act.

Now, some of the objectives of SAN, shorn of the missed target dates, not only remain desirable but have even…