In Nigeria, government policies are neither monitored nor evaluated. Monitoring and Evaluation of policies help to facilitate evidence-based policy design and implementation in order to increase the policy’s accountability and transparency, demonstrate achievements towards policy objectives and assess the policy’s effectiveness, efficiency, results and impacts.
Not in Nigeria though. Policy makers in the country are loath to know how a policy is working, thus denying them the ability to steer and adjust the policy as it is being implemented.
Jibrin Ibrahim, a professor of political science and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Democracy and Development, in June 2021, said that the ban placed by the Central Bank on banks and financial institutions from servicing cryptocurrency transactions in the country as a clear case of the culture of public policy failures in Nigeria.
In other words, he had said, “Crypto exchanges and related companies that previously allowed users to deposit or withdraw their funds directly from their bank accounts can no longer do so. The intention of the policy was to reduce the ability of corrupt individuals from stealing public resources or engaging in criminal activity and hiding the proceeds as digital money. The intention was to save Nigerians from scammers in the digital economy and combat corruption. The real effect of the policy is that it has driven the transactions underground. Most crypto transactions were initially through registered banks and financial institutions, and government could monitor what was going on. With the ban, the transactions have moved to the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading platforms, where government can no longer monitor what is going on.
The volume of transactions in cryptocurrencies has not gone down, from all indications. All that has happened is that government now knows much less about what is happening.”
Read also: Why we fault CBN on naira swap policy – Lawan
When policies fail under this administration, and indeed most have failed, the government sends in security agents to harass and intimidate innocent economic actors, which further reinforces the failure of the policies. Nigeria’s security officers have often gone after bureau de change operators in order to force down the inflating rate of the local currency. They have gone after petroleum marketers to force the availability of petroleum products and now they are going after banks and bankers.
In June and November 2022, operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) raided the Wuse Zone 4 axis, the bureau de change trading hub in Abuja and arrested some operators in a strong-armed, anti-market bid to stop the free fall of the Naira against the dollar.
In December, the State Security Service (SSS); the country’s secret police, said it would “activate its operations” across the country if the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited and oil marketers across the country do not make Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) otherwise known as petrol, available to the public within 48 hours.
The spokesperson of the agency, Peter Afunnaya, had alleged without any credible evidence that the fuel scarcity that has paralysed movement across the country and the Federal Capital Territory was artificially created by a deliberate decision of service stations to hoard fuel in fear of scarcity.
In November 2022, Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari launched a new design for the naira currency notes which the country’s Central Bank Governor, CBN, Godwin Emefiele said was necessary to mop up excess cash from circulation and cut off access to the money used by kidnap-for-ransom gangs.
Emefiele gave a deadline of February 10, 2023, for Nigerians to turn in their old naira notes, after which they would cease to be legal tender.
The plan has led to acute cash shortages across the country.
The Supreme Court last week suspended the government’s deadline to stop the use of old currency notes after Kaduna, Kogi and Zamfara state governments in northern Nigeria filed a suit in the Supreme Court seeking an order “restraining the federal government through the CBN (and) the commercial banks from suspending on the 10th of February 2023 the time frame within which the now older versions of the N200, N500 and N1000 denominations of the Naira may no longer be legal tender”.
They also posited that the cash swap had caused restiveness among Nigerians and that this would “degenerate into the breakdown of law and order.”
Violent protests have been recorded in parts of the country.
The CBN cash swap policy has simply failed. What it shows is that good intentions do not necessarily translate to good results.
Inadequate collaborative policy making by the CBN; a norm in policy making in Nigeria, meant that the cash swap policy was developed in a distinct organisational silo, even though the intervention was certainly going to have wider implications that affect all shades of the country’s citizens and political economy.
The decision of the three states to take the Federal Government to court and the intention by more states to join in the suit against the FG, show clearly that the Federal Government and the CBN failed to establish a common ground for public problem-solving through a constructive management of differences with states and other economic actors in the country.
It is the key reason for the policy implementation difficulty being experienced by the CBN and not the failure of banks as alluded by Emefiele when he briefed the House of Representatives Ad-hoc Committee on the currency debacle. The CBN chief had berated commercial banks, whom he accused of breaching the directives and guidelines given to them by the CBN.
In this grand failure of policy, the CBN has blamed everyone but itself. The fact of the matter though as posited by Professor Ibrahim is that “Nigeria has lost the process of thinking about policy and ensuring that policies are effective, and that the institutions which produce them actually think, plan and monitor these policies, to make sure that they provide the public good that government had intended when they were designed.”
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