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A former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Kingsley Moghalu and the Senior Special Assistant to President Bola Tinubu on Media and Publicity, Temitope Ajayi, played the blame game over the state of Nigeria’s economy.
Moghalu had on Wednesday, January 3, 2024, in a series of tweets claimed that the downward trajectory of Nigeria’s economy in the last 40 years was briefly broken under the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
He said the economy also improved under the PDP-led governments of the late Umaru Yar’Adua, and Goodluck Jonathan.
Moghalu, who served as deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria under the PDP-led administration from 2009 to 2014, also maintained that from 2015 till date, Nigeria has fallen under a “completely incompetent economic management.”
“Nigeria’s economic distress is simply part of a 40-year downward trajectory that was broken only briefly by the Obasanjo civilian presidency and to some degree under Yar’Adua/Jonathan (up to mid-2014). Ever since, especially from 2015, we fell under completely incompetent economic management and have not recovered,” Moghalu tweeted.
He said the fact that oil accounted for 80% of Nigeria’s exports in 2023 showed that the country is yet to get serious about reviving the economy.
The former CBN chief further noted that the presidential palliatives initiative of the current administration is not a good economic tool to create wealth and reverse poverty.
“We need to lay a real foundation for longer-term economic transformation. That 80% of Nigeria’s exports in 2023 was oil tells you we have yet to get serious. “Palliatives” (just google the dictionary definition of the word) will never reverse poverty. Wealth is positively created,” he said.
Reacting to his submissions, Ajayi said it was amusing that Moghalu convinced himself to believe that the administration under which he served was “the ‘golden era of competence’ in the management of the economy of Nigeria.”
The presidential spokesperson admitted that the Obasanjo administration from 1999 to 2007 paved the way for some economic reforms but “Nigeria didn’t see any progress in infrastructural development that has direct bearing on the quality of life.”
He said the period Moghalu attributed to economic improvement in Nigeria was a “Period of trillions of unpaid salary and pension arrears. A period when contractors were owed hundreds of billions with thousands of abandoned and uncompleted projects.”
He further said, “We should never forget Professor Moghalu was a Deputy Governor at the Central Bank during this period when his boss, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi said $20 billion in oil revenue could not be accounted for. He was Deputy Governor at CBN when hundreds of millions of dollars were looted under various guises yet Moghalu wants us to believe that that period was the gold standard in economic management in Nigeria.”
The presidential aide maintained that every index for measuring economic growth significantly declined when Moghalu was Deputy Governor at CBN.
“By the time the Jonathan administration handed over to Buhari on May 29, 2015, the GDP had declined from a 7% growth rate to 2% and Nigeria was already primed for recession which eventually happened with the collapse of crude oil price,” Ajayi said.
He, therefore, urged Moghalu to “Stop fouling the atmosphere with his holier-than-thou remonstrations.”