Hope Buhari Doesn’t Appear On New Naira Notes – Farooq A. Kperogi

With an unusually inept Central Bank of Nigeria governor like Godwin Emefiele and the unprecedently anything-goes climate that the Muhammadu Buhari regime has engendered in the last seven years, I won’t be surprised if the main motive force for the CBN’s move to redesign the naira is to accomplish a plan to put Buhari’s face on one of the notes.

If you think my thought-process is absurd (and it actually is absurd) remember that wildly implausible absurdities have become the main currencies of this regime. For example, Emefiele who should have a more intimate and rarefied knowledge of Nigeria’s monetary policy than anyone once thought the value of the naira was in an inexorably downward spiral because a Nigerian-owned UK-based website called AbokiFX was publishing the black-market foreign exchange rates of the naira.

Emefiele even offered to engage in a physical combat with Oniwinde Adedotun, the owner of AbokiFX, so the value of the naira could rise again! That’s not a normal human being whose judgement anyone should trust and who can be defended against absurdist intentions.

In an unexampled, norm-bending fatuousness, he even became openly politically partisan by unsuccessfully running to be president on the platform of the ruling APC while still a supposedly apolitical CBN governor. In which halfway normal society does that happen?

In a May 14, 2022, column titled “Emefiele: A Corrupt, Inept, Heart-Attack-Loving Presidential Wannabe,” I described Emefiele as an “infernally incompetent, exceptionally corrupt, mind-blowingly self-serving, incomprehensibly clueless, overweeningly ambitious, and cruelly insensitive” person and revealed his embeddedness in partisan political corruption right from when PDP was in power. He has only gotten worse.

Now, also consider the fact that Buhari appointed Ahmed Halilu, the older brother of his wife, Aisha, as the head of the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting, which prints Nigeria’s currencies. Halilu was first quietly appointed as one of only two executive directors at the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting in late 2019. I called attention to it in an October 19, 2019, column titled “Buhari’s House of Commotion and Mamman Daura’s ‘Glass House’.”

People either didn’t care or were too overwhelmed to react, as is now usual with Nigerians’ attitude to the aberrations of the regime, so Buhari went ahead and promoted his brother-in-law from an executive director of Nigeria’s currency printing company to its head on September 1, 2022. Again, no eyebrows were raised.

With an ineffectual, uninformed, obsequious, servile, and partisan CBN governor like Emefiele who is beholden to the Aso Rock cabal and Buhari’s brother-in-law as head of the company that will print the redesigned naira notes, would it be any surprise if Buhari’s portrait appears on, say, the 200 naira note, particularly given Buhari’s recent monomaniacal obsession with how he will be remembered when he leaves office?

And there is a model for Emefiele and Halilu to copy. In January 1973, Uganda’s Idi Amin decided to change his country’s currency and emblazon them with his portrait.

Reuters’ January 29, 1973, reporting on this is worth reproducing because it partly reflects what may happen in Nigeria in the next few days: “Following the introduction of new currency in Uganda, people have been flocking to banks to exchange their old notes.