The former Chairman, Senate Committee on Banking, Insurance and other Financial Institutions, Rafiu Ibrahim, has attributed the present woes of the naira to the introduction of Bureau De Change by a former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida (retd).
He spoke in Ilorin, the Kwara state capital on Thursday at a lecture organised by the state council of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ).
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According to him, the BDCs were introduced to legalise the then unregistered black market.
Rafiu who represented Kwara South in the 8th National Assembly said the rate at which the naira depreciated in those few years explained why Nigerians had never gotten over the idea of a strong currency as the mark of a ‘strong economy.
“The woes of the naira cumulated in a 1,789 per cent devaluation in eight years of that regime.
“The interference of politics in matters of the economics by the current President Muhammadu Buhari government had eroded the gains recorded during the regimes of Charles Soludo and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi as governors of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN),” he added.
He lamented that the nation had neglected agriculture to the detriment of employment, production, income and foreign exchange earnings.
