Tunde Sabiu, a nephew and close aide to former President Muhammadu Buhari, told Godwin Emefiele, the former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), to redesign the naira notes, Jim Obazee, the special investigator on the CBN and related entities has revealed.
Obazee — a former executive secretary of the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria, appointed as the CBN special investigator in July 2023 — disclosed this in a report submitted to President Bola Tinubu on Wednesday.
In the document titled ‘Report of the Special Investigation on CBN and Related Entities (Chargeable offences)’, Obaze said Sabiu first told Emefiele to consider the redesign of naira notes.
The report also revealed that the former CBN governor wrote to Buhari on October 6, 2023, that he wanted to redesign and reconfigure the N1000, N500, and N200 notes. But the CBN board learned about the policy about 70 days later.
“The former president tagged along but did not approve the redesign as required by law. Buhari merely approved that the currency be printed in Nigeria” Obazee’s report said.
“The redesign was only mentioned to the board of the CBN on December 15, 2022, after Emefiele had awarded the contract to the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Plc on October 31, 2022.”
Emefiele reportedly outsourced the redesign of the naira to De La Rue, a UK company, for £205,000. This decision came after the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting PLC (NSPM) expressed its inability to fulfill the contract within the required timeframe.
Out of the N61.5 billion allocated for printing the new notes, N31.79 billion had already been disbursed by the time of the investigation.
