Edo North Senator, Adams Oshiomhole, has said that the “excessive printing of money” by the Central Bank of Nigeria under the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari through the Ways and Means policy crippled the naira.
The Ways and Means provision allows the Federal Government to borrow from the CBN if it needs emergency finance to fund delayed government expected cash receipts of fiscal deficits.
At a Progressives Governors Forum’s Meeting and Interactive Session in Benin City, Edo State, on Saturday, Oshiomhole blamed the policy for the eventual collapse of the Nigerian currency against the US dollar. We are coming from a country that was almost like Zimbabwe or Idi Amin’s Uganda where he asked the Central Bank governor ‘go and print more money for us to share to the people’. And the governor said, ‘if we print more money, Uganda currency will be like a sheet of paper’.
“This is what the immediate past CBN governor was doing. In the Senate, we have the record that they printed over ₦31 trillion which they called Ways and Means. You know when the government wants to deceive people they use jargon.
“They called it Ways and Means but I can tell you what it means: it means a situation in which the government prints banknotes, not based on what we have earned or any resources, just print banknotes to go and share to the people to meet their money illusion. It is the result of that excessive printing of banknotes that led to the collapse of the naira,” Oshiomhole said. The former Edo State governor further stated that “to understand the root cause of the present cost of living and the exchange rate regime, you must trace it and locate it in terms of the excessive amount of banknotes through so-called Ways and Means which the past government created and which this government has eliminated”.
He added that Nigeria was “borrowing everyday the way fish drink water”, adding that it has become President Bola Tinubu’s burden to pay back those loans in order to guarantee the sovereignty of Nigeria.
In 2024, the Senate inaugurated an ad-hoc committee to investigate the Ways and Means and the Anchor Borrowers Programme of the apex bank.