A strange angle to the sustained injection of foreign exchange (forex) into the crisis ridden dollar market has emerged at the Nigerian Senate.
This is coming on the heels of a bill sponsored by Senator Rose Oko from Cross River State which will among others, restrain the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) from random disbursement of intervention fund which now stood at about N1.2 trillion without approvals from the Senate.
Key argument of the bill is that the apex bank had been making the interventions without recourse to law.
The bill is titled “A bill for an Act to Amend the Central Bank of Nigeria Act 2007 to Ensure Transparency and Accountability in the Operation of the Bank and Subject intervention Advances to the Approval of National Assembly.”
According to the lawmakers, CBN had been in contravention of the provision of the constitution and the Fiscal Responsibility Act through extra-budgetary intervention to selected bodies, institutions and agencies.
Senator Oko decried what she described as lack of clear mechanism in place to monitor and track the CBN intervention funds, stressing that lack of proper tracking of CBN intervention fund has made it difficult for the lawmakers to effectively carry out oversight on the agency.
She explained that many countries across the globe including Ghana, Liberia, Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda intervene in their economy like that of CBN programme, but with legislative approval.
A list of some of the CBN’s various intervention funds done without National Assembly approval, as presented by the lawmaker include the N620 billion bailout for five banks, namely Afribank Plc, intercontinental Bank Plc, Union Bank of Nigeria, oceanic Bank and Finbank plc, varrious donations to tertiary institution running into several billions, the N300 billion bailout to states drawn from $2.1 billion NLNG’s taxes and dividens to pay salaries.
“N2.2 trilliom said to have been set aside by the CBN to fund various sector of the economy like Commercial Agricultural credit Scheme (CACS) N200 billion, Power and Aviation intervention fund (PAIF) N300 billion, MSMEDF- N200 billion, real sector support facility (RSSF)-N300 billion, and Nigeria Electrical Market Stabilization Facility (NEMSF) N213 billion totalling N1.223 trillion among others.
“The total capital budget for 2016 was N1.8 trillion. If N1.2 trillion was indeed disbursed or intended as intervention fund, then an amount almost size the capital budget was disbursed without appropriation and tracking to know effectiveness of the intervention in the economy.
However, industry experts who barred their minds on the matter were divided, saying this Bill would have come up earlier than now the positive impacts of the interventions are about to converge the parallel rates of forex.
