Nigeria never ceases to amuse me. The Nigerian too! Somehow, Nigerians have successfully presented Nigeria to the world as peopled by human beings who rarely are in love with deductive reasoning. For this reason, successive governments ride Nigerians like donkeys. And, Nigerians make their leaders believe that they are not too far from the lower rungs of the index when they celebrate the ‘discovery’ of abandoned naira notes and build arguments to suggest that such cash became abandoned because the owners could no longer spend them on account of government’s decision to do a colour-swap of the naira in what it called naira re-design. But, memories can be very short.
A lot of things happened in Nigeria with the advent of the Muhammadu Buhari administration in 2015. Buhari happened to Nigeria with a certain messianic pontification to stamp out corruption by jailing corrupt public officials. This was without minding the maxim of criminal prosecution where every allegation must be proven beyond reasonable doubt. With this mindset, Buhari, through his appointed officials, descended on the banking institution with big combs, combing every account held in the banks. Accounts with huge holdings were flagged while the account owners, individual or corporate, were accused, prosecuted, and condemned in the public court and routinely humiliated. The legal norm of ‘innocent until proven guilty was changed overnight to become ‘guilty until proven innocent in Buhari’s court’. A lot of hardworking Nigerians, many of who never had any dealings with politics and never held public office, were embarrassed and hounded into detention. They relied on the judiciary to see the skies again. This led to massive withdrawals from many banks.
Not satisfied that the combing of accounts held in the banks was not yielding the desired results, the hounds went busting private homes and offices in what many called sting operations. They even broke into the homes of Supreme Court Justices in search of money. Soon, Nigerians started hearing of abandoned cash here and there. In March 2017, Nigerians were told that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) had discovered N47m, in cash, abandoned at the airport in Kaduna. In April of the same year, it was reported that the same EFCC discovered some N448m abandoned inside a shop in Lagos. Same April, they were told that EFCC had discovered over N250m, in cash, abandoned at Balogun market in Lagos. Of course, there was also the issue of abandoned cash, in different currencies, discovered in a flat in Ikoyi Lagos.
Nigerians do not know, as yet, what happened to these ‘discoveries’. However, they applauded and gave Buhari the thumbs-up for presuming to be fighting corruption when in essence; he had introduced a measure that was aimed at destroying the economy. The implication of that crude and corrupt method of fighting corruption was that many people who had huge cash deposits in the banks managed to pull them and found other traditionally native ways of hiding cash. This included storing the same in metal, wooden, and mud boxes at home. Some may have also created underground safes or overhead tanks. While this lasted, Nigerians were regaled with ‘news’ that cash abandoned at a farm in Nasarawa state had been found. Many were also told, and they believed, that some big people had been busted hiding cash in the septic tanks at their homes.
However, it may be true that people hid money in their homes or in other places that the hounds could not access. But the fact is that the crude method in which the Buhari regime embarked on its anti-corruption crusade, forced many Nigerians, especially those who are politically exposed, to seek other ways of hiding their cash. This has its drawback on the economy. One such major drawback, as announced by the Central Bank governor, Godwin Emefiele, was the shortfall of the amount of naira in circulation. Emefiele had said while announcing the naira re-design policy, that there was “significant hoarding of banknotes by members of the public, with statistics showing that over 85 percent of currency in circulation are outside the vaults of commercial banks,”
Specifically, Emefiele said: “To be more specific, as, at the end of September 2022, available data at the CBN indicate that N2.73 trillion out of the N3.23 trillion in circulation, was outside the vaults of Commercial Banks across the country; and supposedly held by the public.” The naira re-design was, therefore, an ingenious way of forcing this N2.73 trillion back into the banking system. President Buhari also echoed Emefiele when he said that the redesigned notes will force hoarded money back into the banking system. However, there is no clear statement on how much it cost Nigeria to redesign the naira. The closest anyone knows, publicly, of what it cost Nigeria to achieve the redesign was the allegation by a political actor, Omoyele Sowore, that the policy cost Nigeria some N218 billion. Assuming, but not conceding that this is the fact, it will mean that it cost Nigeria some N218 billion to correct the effects of Buhari’s primitiveness in the anti-corruption war.
The wider implication of this crude form of fighting corruption is the negative impact it has had on the economy where investible funds became more scarce than petrol. This crude way of fighting corruption also saw many houses confiscated and forfeited to the government even where the actual owners did not get a fair hearing, a basic principle in justice delivery. My fear over this is that many such properties may be returned to the owners if they ask for a case review in the future and successfully prove a lack of fair hearing. The thing here is this: you can fight the anti-corruption battle, and win successfully if you deploy the appropriate technology. No one wins a battle against corruption which is fought on the president’s whims and body language. What Nigeria has rather done is engage in a witch-hunt. Witch-hunt is built on the background of someone’s perceptive feelings and mindset. It has never been fact-based. That perhaps is why the federal government’s anti-corruption battle woefully failed. However, it succeeded only in strategically dismantling, and destroying, the economy such that Nigeria had more money outside the banking sector and not much for investment. The only sector that witnessed massive investment seems to be real estate. This could be for the basic reason that it is easier to launder money through land acquisition for estate development. This may be a reason why while factories are shutting down for lack of production inputs and funds; many private estates are being developed in Abuja and several other cities.
So far, there is no evidence that all the discovered cash is inside the banking system. There is also no shred of evidence that they were legally and judicially invested in any venture. They may still be ‘captives’ of the anti-crime commissions. Common sense, though not actually common, would suggest that rather than hound huge cash-holding entities, private and corporate, out of the economy, they should be encouraged to invest same in the economy and so doing, expand the economic space, create more jobs and wealth and help grow the country though tax and other responsibilities to the state. Refusal to do this has contributed greatly to Nigeria’s growth on the poverty index. But, it is Buhari’s Nigeria.
