DOES Mr. Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) since 2014, desire to succeed President Muhammadu Buhari as elected leader of the country in 2023?
This is from all indications the case.
As has become an all too familiar story in Nigeria, all kinds of faceless groups are urging on Emefiele to run, printing campaign posters on his behalf, and even placing advertorials in the media in pursuit of this objective of pushing his candidacy even though the man himself has maintained a studied silence on the issue.
The main thrust of their campaign is that he has performed so brilliantly as CBN governor over the last seven years that the governor of the apex bank is best placed to help actualize the ongoing ‘economic consolidation project’ as well as continue and achieve the Buhari administration’s goal of lifting 100 million people out of poverty in the next couple of years.
Of course, the dominant reaction has been that if indeed he has this political aspiration, which is his right in any case, Emefiele should immediately resign from his current appointment to pursue this goal in the interest of fairness and fairplay, the credibility of the critical office of CBN governor, the integrity of monetary policy in the remaining years of Buhari’s tenure as well as the health and stability of the Nigerian economy.
Ace columnist, Sam Omatseye, is one of those who have pointed out the patent immorality of the deceptive antics of Emefiele and his cheerleaders on this matter.
With unsparing pungency, he wrote in this newspaper on Monday: “An abuse of office is going on with Godwin Emefiele.
His so-called committee of friends failed to protect the CBN governor. Rallies are around town.
Posters are everywhere. He is still mum. If he wants to run for president, he should resign his office.
He should not hide under pieties about God or Muhammadu Buhari”. Of course, the very next day, the apex bank governor’s shadowy friends had responded in a full page advertorial.
Seeking unconvincingly to distance the CBN governor from the campaigns that he run for the highest office in the land, they argued among others that “Godwin Emefiele without prejudice to how he may feel about the posters, also respects the constitutional right of Nigerians, guaranteed under Section 39 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended, to hold opinions and express them without any encumbrances”.
This is of course utter balderdash. Anyone who is convinced that Emefiele is unaware of the architects of the campaign and indeed part of the entire game plan will believe anything.
One of the arguments of some of these amorphous groups for an Emefiele candidacy is that he has a track record of loyalty, patriotism and performance and is different from the typical politicians “who are well versed in political deception, intimidation and blackmail”. This is a grand irony.
For, the very essence of the surreptitious campaigns that have heralded Emeliele’s bid for the presidency in 2023 is deception on a grand and stunning scale. If he wants to contest the office of President next year, Emefiele should be bold and courageous enough to declare his ambition rather than acting by proxy.
He should be honest enough to voice his aspiration openly and clearly as well as demonstrate sufficient loyalty and patriotism to the country to quit his current office so as to shield the sensitive institution of the CBN from corrosive political partisanship.
What we have here is also fundamentally a question of character and integrity.
Over the last seven years, Emefiele has presided over the most massive financial intervention by the apex bank in virtually every key sector of the economy.
As my colleague, Sanya Oni, put it in his column on Thursday, “Never mind those high sounding programmes of the Buhari administration, the man, Emefiele, – in the absence of an effective fiscal counter -foil from the executive branch – has quite easily become the author and finisher of all developmental activities of the current government”.
In other words, the CBN under Emefiele has only seized upon the ineptness of the managers of the fiscal side of the economy to get the Apex bank involved in the humongous funding of diverse sectors of the economy – agriculture, textiles, aviation, tertiary education, power, health, entertainment etc with hardly any mechanism in place for effectively ascertaining the efficacy or impact of these policy initiatives.
The Emefiele-must-run orchestra credits the CBN governor for whatever may be the successes of the Buhari administration on the economic policy terrain as if there is no Vice President and the National Economic Council, no Minister of Works and Housing, Minister of Transportation, Minister of Finance, Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Power, Minister of Trade etc.
They assert that Emefiele is singularly responsible for the vacuous and largely meaningless claim that Nigeria is the number one economy in Africa while studiously ignoring the hardly disputable logic that, if so, the CBN governor should be held no less culpable for the equally valid assertion that Nigeria is currently the poverty capital of the world.
To quote Sanya Oni once again, “Yes, Emefiele wants to run.
No problem with that. What is problematic is when he prefers to hide behind the fingers – and some dark – forces to proclaim or quite predictably, deny an ambition that bears every hallmark of opportunism and greed!
Or when as he seems set to do, willfully convert an office held in trust to further a personal ambition”.
The Nation
