By Ayodele Oni
A Human Rights Activist, Pastor Ifeanyi Odili, has advised the Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN) and security agencies to closely monitor operations of Bureau De Change in the country.
Pastor Odili, General Secretary of the Campaign for Democracy (CD), also urged the National Assembly to look into the CBN extant internal policies guiding FOREX to save Nigerians.
In a statement in Akure, Odili pointed out that “It is most unfortunate that since CBN liberalized FOREX in favor of the Bureau De Change BDCs operators, Naira has suffered huge depreciation.”
According to him, CBN internal arrangement for FOREX has caused untold depreciation of Naira and economic hardships in Nigeria.
He decried a situation whereby banks complain of shortage of foreign exchange whereas BDC operators have excess.
“Instead of beneficiaries to access their money in the banks, they are directed to the agents of Bureaux De Change which in turn put the foreign currencies at higher rates.
“Sometime in August, 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN) after its Monetary meeting said it was inundated with at least 100 new BDC applications per month, leaving us to ask what type of nation is Nigeria?
“The Nigerian economy is currently battling with weak economic growth rate, high inflationary pressures and exchange rate volatility.
“With high unemployment rate, Nigerians who are willing to work could not find jobs.
“It was in response to this national malady that the CBN introduced a number of measures to inject life back into the economy through its development functions.
“In this spirit, the apex monetary authority sold foreign exchange to BDC operators with a view to addressing exchange rate volatility but this purpose has been defeated.
“Naira has depreciated against major currencies of the world particularly the US dollar. The arbitrage between the official and parallel market rates moved from about N50 in 2015 to N120 in 2016, and to N90 in 2017.
“It was about N60 each in 2018 and 2019. The arbitrage rose further to N75 in 2020 and to N95 in 2021. What the above arbitrage opportunities mean is that, a BDC that gets $20,000 weekly even with a N50 arbitrage opportunity will make a million naira profit weekly, translating to N4 million monthly and N52 million annually.
“Only few small and medium enterprises (SMEs) make this kind of returns annually. The decent BDC operators in the country should have called their erring colleagues to order.
“This was more so from the point when 400 financiers of Boko Haram activities were arrested in April this year in Kano, Borno, Abuja, Lagos, Sokoto, Adamawa, Kaduna and Zamfara states.
“Even with that discovery alone, it was necessary for the CBN and other security agencies to monitor operations of the BDCs closely.”
