Prof. Kingsley Moghalu, former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has told President Bola Tinubu to reshuffle his cabinet to enhance investors’ confidence.
Moghalu also noted that the Nigerian economy is in serious crisis and that it will take about three, four or five years for the country to come out of the crisis.
The former CBN Deputy Governor who disagreed with the Federal Government that the economy is not in distress, however advised President Bola Tinubu on a couple things that he can do to improve on the governance, pointing out that forensic audit should be carried out by the president before it is presented to the National Assembly
The chairman of Africa Private Sector Summit spoke on Arise TV on Wednesday, and stressed the need to subject the annual budget to forensic audit before presentation to the National Assembly.
He said, “You must differentiate between objective analysis and politically inspired optimism or what some people call hope.
“It’ll take time for us to come out of the crisis. It’ll take about three, four, five years to come out of this crisis, and anybody telling you that by the end of this year that it’ll be Eldorado that person is just promoting some partisan interest. He shouldn’t be taken serious.
While proffering solutions, he said, “Tinubu should have a council that should have the capacity, internally, to take a full spectrum of the issues. Such a council should address the question of how to structurally diversify away from dependence on oil, or agriculture or any one particular thing.
“I also said that to restore confidence, President Tinubu needs to reshuffle his cabinet because one of the reasons investors’ confidence disappeared was the process of appointing his cabinet. It was too slow and when he made the announcement, it was largely a political kind of cabinet.
“Investors were hoping for something more technocratic to deal with the crisis at hand. Everybody knows that he inherited a crisis. His government also made some mistakes that accentuated the crisis. There was an opportunity to begin to address that crisis but the opportunity was lost by some of the actions and inactions of the present government as well.
“It took a long time to name a substantive CBN governor. It even took longer to form the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), which is what the investors are always watching to take decisions. So, when you have more than seven months gap from an administration being sworn in to the first meeting of the MPC, it tells you something.
He added, “I did say that in my presentation that one of the major problems with Nigeria’s economy is the failure of fiscal policy. Our fiscal policy has to be completely and utterly revamped. It is so weak, it doesn’t even exist.
“If you look at our budget every year, a lot of it is just a scam, unfortunately, I’m sorry to use the word. The corruption in Nigeria governance architecture is so endemic. It is so structurally rooted. One of the ideas that I have, I think I mentioned it the lecture is that every budget that we have must be subjected to a forensic audit by the president before it is presented to the National Assembly, because civil servants in Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) bury a lot of dead bodies inside those documents,” Moghalu stated.
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