Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
By Chido Nwangwu. Follow on X (Twitter) @Chido247
Nigeria’s Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, has blamed the immediate past administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, a retired army General, for the country’s financial woes especially the high rates of inflation.
Edun, a confidant and key figure in President Bola Tinubu’s team delivered what could be seen as the harshest public criticism of Buhari who handed over power to Tinubu.
Edun argued that Nigeria’s problems were complicated by Buhari whom he criticized for “aimlessly” printing trillions of the Naira “without productivity.” As a student of politics and power, I believe that such a far-reaching, significant and critical characterization of former President Buhari at the formal venue of the legislative arm of government would have some notification of the bombshell….
He stated that it happened under Buhari’s presidency: “The N22.7 trillion printed by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through Ways and Means overdraft for the federal government from 2015 to 2023 landed Nigeria into hyper-inflation. We talked about inflation. Where has it come from? It came from 8 years of just printing money not matched by productivity. What happened was that for eight years, the weak were left to their own devices. It is the privileged few that took everything. That is the reality. So that money supply must be brought back.”
It is obvious that Edun has spoken with unusual forthrightness and without any reservations about whose ox or cattle is gored!
He spoke on Wednesday, March 6, 2024, to the Nigerian Senate Committee on Finance and noted that “You have given us the mandate to raise N7 trillion which we will do by sucking money from the market, using it to pay back the CBN and giving the government a balanced book. We are going to audit even the N22.7 trillion printed aimlessly.”
It was Peter Schiff, an American investor, stockbroker, author and commentator on financial matters who warned that “Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power.”
Edun’s formal, influential and expansive ministerial designation is the same as that given first to the highly accomplished Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, currently, the 7th Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO). She assumed this latest position on March 1, 2021, and became the first woman and the first African to serve as such.
Mr. Edun, a technocrat, had as his immediate predecessor (during the Buhari era) Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed who held an expansive but different designation (for 4 years) as Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, from 2019 to 2023. She served as Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, from 2018 to 2019. She’s a sibling of the immediate former Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai.
Sadly, as I stated in previous analyses, Nigerians gave Buhari their trust, their sacred votes and their last drip of hope but he disappointed them. The bitter truth remains that despite the Goebbelian propaganda, Nigerians endured 8 long, bloody and difficult years of insecurities, religion-based conflicts/killings, the banking fiasco and truckloads of palaver. For millions of Nigerians who live, these days, months and years, a tormenting life of hardships, blood, sorrow and tears, Edun’s weighty allegation is yet another reminder of the ruin and seemingly endless incompetence of the Buhari regime.
IF what Mr. Edun has alleged as examples of former President Buhari’s actions which ruined Nigeria’s economy and unleashed inflationary rates to the sky, and caused the exponentially unprecedented decimation of the value/exchange rate of the Naira, I think he should be accorded the privilege to respond; as should his financial/economic teams and Central Bank leadership during the 8 years of the Buhari presidency — a presidency of small things, of petty malice and ancient grudges, of crass nepotism and clannishness, of moral corruption and assorted inequities, of impunity and incapacity!
•Dr. Chido Nwangwu, author of the forthcoming 2024 book, MLK, Mandela & Achebe: Power, Leadership and Identity., is Founder of the first African-owned, U.S-based newspaper on the internet, USAfricaonline.com, and established USAfrica in 1992 in Houston.He has appeared as an analyst on CNN, ALJazeera, SKYnews, and served as an adviser on Africa business to Houston’s former Mayor Lee Brown. Follow him on Twitter @Chido247
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