- Presidential candidate, Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim has set out the criteria to select a Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor if he emerges president
- The Peoples Trust (PT) and third force presidential candidate said he will select a CBN governor to restructure the economy for growth
- He also remarked on some of the unhealthy current practices by the apex court
The Peoples Trust (PT) and third force presidential candidate, Mr Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim has set out the criteria to select a Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor to restructure the economy for growth and indigenous technology should he emerge as president of Nigeria in 2019.
Hashim, a renowned global business guru, said the governor of central bank must be somebody who aligns with his vision to completely restructure the Nigerian economy, to make it a productive economy.
Hashim who was recently endorsed by 10 political parties made this known during an interactive session with selected journalists in Abuja during the weekend.
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His words: “You cannot be a central bank governor that is beholding to the interest of money lender almost in the past 20 years and the bankers and money lender have been controlling the central bank and the central bank has been ordered along their interests rather than along the mandate of building a solid productive economy and creating employment.
“They only see employment creation as CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to demonstrate that they are intervening. You are not just supposed to be making tokenist measures of those issues, it should be the core of their mandate.
“They should manage the monetary policy in such a way that the employment is high, interest lending rate is low, manufacturer expanse, infrastructural expanse. This must be what they are doing but right now they are taking money from the economy and just financing bonds and crowding out the real sector.’’
Commenting further on the economy, Hashim stated that, “Manufacturers cannot take money because all the real money has been taken out in bonds at high interest rates and then civil servants take this money and go and change it in the dollar market. That’s what has been happening.’’
Explaining what he is doing differently, he said, “We have been very clear on our road map to build the economy and to make it a $4 trillion economy. We have been clear with our strategy to build infrastructure.
“We have been clear with our strategy to build indigenous technology which is key to being a self-reliant economy otherwise even when you have all the money, from sales of primary products assuming the price is even high, it is going to be a logistic nightmare for you to be importing everything that you need.
“The critical issue is to have the technological base to be able to produce majority of what you consume locally and at relatively competitive costs and that means a lot of reforms even in the financial sector.
“I mean you have to deepen the financial sector. Investors and local industrialists and manufacturers should be able to access money at single digit interest rate, adding that, a Chinese manufacturer cannot be taking at four per cent and a Nigeria manufacturing taking at 25 per cent and you want to be competitive. So there is already a 21 per cent differential in terms of your own cost of money.
“An important part of this strategy will be also from day one when I am going to be making my appointments of who is going to be the governor of the central bank when I become president.’’
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Meanwhile, Olawepo-Hashim has berated the All Progressive Congress (APC)-led federal government, accusing them of poor economic management strategy, which he said has led to greater poverty amongst Nigerians.
The candidate running on the platform of the popular People’s Trust (PT), in an interactive session with journalists, regretted that, “APC’s woeful failure has put 88 million Nigerians into acute poverty,” adding that, “1.1m got into that bracket in the last four months despite relatively high oil price.”
He said Nigerians are getting poorer because of the woeful economic management strategy or lack of strategy of the APC government, stressing that, “even though Nigeria was not a prosperous economy when President Buhari took over, Nigerian economy has now gone from bad to worse.”
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