President Buhari, why?

A president in the final months of their presidency is usually only concerned about three things. They want to make sure they complete any significant policies or projects they had started in order to earn credit for them and beef up their legacies. They want to consolidate and firm up their reputation for whatever positive things they had achieved to remind everyone that they too had been here and did some good. Above all, presidents in the dying months of their governments actively try to avoid any new risky ideas or policies that might end up merely overshadowing everything else they might have done.

I imagine that all three reasons will apply to President Buhari as much as any before him, everywhere. And I cannot help but wonder why Buhari would want to risk everything just to support an ill-conceived, probably ill-motivated and certainly badly implemented policy as the still ongoing mess of a policy called naira redesign by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). Why is the president risking it all just to go down the pit with the CBN governor, Mr Godwin Emefiele, over a clearly ill-fated policy that, even if it were implemented well, would have little to no longer term positive impact?

After more than three weeks of a harrowing experience for millions of Nigerians in which many have in fact died on long queues and in hospitals just to get cash, I am  yet to read or hear a single convincing argument about why the naira redesign policy must be implemented within such a short and impossible window. And the question with which we ended this column last week has only got louder in my mind: President Buhari, why? Since last week when I first raised this question, many things have happened around this policy, yet almost nothing has changed.

First, newspapers reported at the weekend what many well-informed Nigerians have known all along: the CBN does not have the capacity to print the required volume of new naira notes to facilitate normal exchange of goods and services within the impossible window that it has imposed on so large an economy as ours. This much, newspapers reported, Emefiele admitted to the National Council of State meeting held Friday. Of course, the CBN has since denied Emefiele said any of that, but as political journalists everywhere know only too well, official denial of an embarrassing press story is often the very test of its accuracy.

Second, the Supreme Court has ordered the CBN to print enough new notes or re-circulate the old ones, an order the CBN has filed an objection to. Nigerians await some useful conclusion to this legal battle that has changed nothing so far. And third, the seven days President Buhari requested has lapsed and the original deadline of 11th February 2023 has also come and gone, yet the president has not issued a definitive statement that will end the suffering of Nigerians, or at least show which way for the nation to go. Thus, the whole economy and society are stuck in uncertainty, while the unending scarcity of the naira—old or new—continues to do untold social and economic damage to Nigerians.

As the former Chief Economic Adviser to President Yar’adua, Dr Tanimu Yakubu, said on an Arise TV news programme last week, the most important consequence of this policy so far is that it is decapitalising Nigerians, a situation that is more likely to be worse in the north than other parts of the country, as traders throw away their wares at half the price just to get something to exchange to survive. Moreover, as he noted also, naira is no longer a means of exchange, it is a commodity in its own right: nothing sells faster or more profitably in Nigeria today than the naira itself. Yet, President Buhari has not seen it fit to reverse the policy, or at least offer any comforting comments to Nigerians on this. Why so?

In an interview with TVC news early this month, Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State said that there are some “elements” in Aso Rock who are working against the chances of his party’s presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and that these elements were hiding behind President Buhari’s desire to do what he thinks is right. Because Nigerians love “cabals”, El Rufai’s comments were widely reported in the news as yet another story of an elusive cabal scheming close to power, which may or may not be true. But the real import of El Rufai’s comments is that the president has been sold a dummy with the naira redesign policy by people working for their own self-interests, not to mention that the comments imply Buhari himself cannot tell the difference between a dummy and the real thing about a policy of his own government.

I personally still can’t find any long term positive impacts of this policy, even if it were well implemented, which then raises the important question of why President Buhari will buy into it at such enormous political costs to his own government and legacy. Perhaps, President Buhari genuinely believes the anti-corruption credentials of the naira redesign policy as marketed by the CBN and thinks the policy affords him one last strike to slay the dragon of corruption in Nigeria. At least, he appears to believe this strongly enough to have stayed with it to date, even as it is tearing all that he has strove to achieve over the past eight years into shreds. In the short term at least, the president might be remembered more for this shamble of a policy than by anything else, which for those who care about Buhari’s legacy, is truly sad.

Of course, many Nigerians, particularly the supporters of Mr Peter Obi of the Labour Party, also think the same: if Tinubu and the APC campaign cannot buy votes, they imagine, then their side stands a better chance of winning the election. But no single anti-corruption policy on its own, however effective, can end the scale and extent of corruption in Nigeria. Moreover, naira redesign cannot end vote-buying. If anything, the suffering this policy has entailed over the past weeks may already have made even more Nigerian voters vulnerable to vote-buying, which itself doesn’t have to be transacted only in naira notes or money at all. And for Tinubu in particular, the idea that all of this has been designed to work against him, whether true or not, has in fact made him rather more popular among many more undecided voters.

There is, then, only one question left unanswered: is it true that some “elements” have relied on the president’s desire to do right and sold him an anti-corruption dummy merely to advance their own political interests? No one knows for sure yet, but if it is true, it amounts to the highest abuse of power and corruption imaginable. And for that reason alone, I call on the president to appoint an independent prosecutor to determine the facts and make them public. That is the surest way to undo the damage done to his legacy by this naira redesign mess.