By Deborah Nnamdi
President Bola Tinubu says for three straight months, he has fulfilled Nigeria’s financial obligations without touching remittance by Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPCL, or exploring Ways and Means from the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN.
Disclosing this one Monday, during his first media chat with journalists, the president said he met Nigeria’s financial obligations without falling back to the old order.
“Push me to my brag mode, in the last three months, I’ve not taken a penny from NNPC before I meet my other obligations. To me, that is excellent.
“Without going into Ways and Means, I’ve met all obligations,” he boastedAsked whether he was scoring himself, Tinubu said he should grade himself if he did his homework right.
Ways and Means is the offering of short-term financing by the apex bank to the Federal Government to cover its budget shortfalls.
In September 2024, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Olayemi Cardoso, blamed his embattled predecessor, Godwin Emefiele, for harming the Nigerian economy through the excess printing of money and the pumping of liquidity into the system.
“In 2015, the money supply was about N19tn, and in 2023, it was N54tn. That’s a huge increase, a very huge increase. And then a substantial amount of that was through ways and means.
“So, essentially, the printing of money resulted in a huge amount of money chasing the same amount of goods or a relative amount of goods. I think that context is very important to have,” Tinubu said.
