My man of the
year is Godwin Emefiele, fondly and affectionately called ‘Meffy’ by his
ever-growing list of admirers, offline and online. What a year, what a man. At
the beginning of the year, his enemies gathered in the North and the South
ready to devour him.
Today, every single one of them has been delivered into
his hand and he has crushed them to fine powder and sawdust. Some misguided and
unfortunate elements even took out paid advertorials in newspapers early in the
year asking him to resign.
They wasted their money.
How did he do
it? No one can accuse the CBN governor of being a macroeconomics mastermind,
but he knows ‘the thing’. In place of a coherent economic policy, when it came
to power, the APC had nothing but a vast, dark black void. All we remember from
2015 is that the President bet everything on the exchange rate – he wanted the
naira to be strong and stable like Theresa May. But an economy is much more
than the exchange rate to the dollar. Sensing this opportunity to fill a
vacuum, the CBN governor thus stepped into the breach and filled that void.
This is the secret of his legendary performance in 2017 – like it was famously
said of Kissinger one time, he managed to give different people what they
wanted and left each one feeling like they had ‘won’.
After much
fighting and disagreement, the CBN discovered that you can have a market and
the heavens will not fall. By creating a space for all the people who really
needed to have a willing buyer, willing seller arrangement, the CBN governor
made a big problem disappear from view. The investors and portfolio people who
need to be able to bring in dollars and take it out without too much headache
now have a private room in the Nigerian economy where they can do their thing.
That market has settled down and the President has been given what he wants – a
stable exchange rate that does not swing too wildly. Just to make sure the
banks don’t play any funny dollar speculation games, the governor resurrected a
deadly weapon, last seen in the days of Abacha, known as Stabilisation
Securities or STABs for short.
When he felt
the banks have ‘too much’ naira, he simply debits them and gives them treasury
bills in exchange. That is, you must buy that market whether you like it or
not. Those who did not like it were at liberty to hand in their banking licence
and try their luck in Cotonou. Haters will say this is a strange way to run an
economy and it is some kind of ‘wuruwuru’ to the answer, but what do they know?
The important point is that the Oga at the top wants to ‘see’ a stable currency
– how you arrive at it is not that important. So, the governor has satisfied
the political constituency by giving it what it wants.
The other
group of people who needed to be pacified with a dummy in their mouth is the
Nigerian upper middle class. The governor astutely observed that these guys are
essentially babies and just want to be able to travel out of Nigeria from time
to time, order nice things from abroad and post all of them (the goods and the
trips) on Instagram. Whether or not the actual economy catches fire and burns to
the ground is secondary – of paramount importance is that they possess the
necessary dollars to ‘pepper them’.
Ordinarily, you’d ignore such people or
shout at them to grow up, but it is impossible to do so in this case because
they are fully armed to the teeth with Twitter and Facebook. If you ignore
them, they will abuse you on social media and ‘heat up the polity’ which no one
really wants. So, the CBN governor found a way to give them what they want, and
they have since kept quiet. Their problem has been solved.
As for the
rest of the economy, they have been getting regular ‘injections’ of around
$190m every week or so. Whether or not this is what they want or it’s enough
for them is irrelevant – the key thing is that they know what they are going to
get, no more no less. It is left to them to plan their lives accordingly around
that reality. Finally, hardly a day goes by now without newspapers reporting
Nigeria’s reserves going up. So far it has increased by more than 40% this year
since investors have been given a room to bring in their money, easing the
pressure on the reserves.
The governor
is rightly proceeding on a victory lap to shame his enemies over this. Scandals
which would have toppled a governor in any other country have only served to
confound his haters. Paradise Papers? He simply came out and said, ‘it was Jim’
and the nation acquiesced as if under a spell. How about when some people wrote
bad things about him in the foreign media claiming he was printing money to
fund the government? Again, like the legendary tales about ‘area fathers’ who
would put ‘something’ in their mouth before addressing an angry crowd, he just
said it was lent against TSA and his adversaries could not gainsay him.
The 10,000
who rose against him from his left have been converted into a decimal place.
The 100,000 who massed against his governorship from his right have been
scattered as far as Cameroun. A few days ago, one organisation declared him to
be the greatest and most legendary CBN governor of the decade. His admirers on
social media took offence at this – surely, he is not just the greatest CBN
governor seen in Nigeria since Lord Lugard joined the country together 103
years ago, but the greatest in the world, period.
For all these
and many more, Godwin Emefiele is my man of the year. He will surely do more in
2018. I don’t have a hat but if I did have one, I’d doff it exuberantly for
him. I wish you all, dear readers, a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous 2018
to come.
Written by
Feyi Fawehinmi
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