The Presidency said cryptocurrency trading website Binance will destroy the Nigerian economy if not stopped.
Special Adviser to President Tinubu on Information and Strategy Bayo Onanuga stated this in an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Wednesday.
According to Onanuga, the platform could destroy the nation’s economy by arbitrarily fixing the foreign exchange rate.
He said, “If we don’t clamp down on Binance, Binance will destroy the economy of this country. They just fix the rate.
“We have saboteurs. Look at what Binance is doing to our economy. That is why the government moved against Binance. Some people sit down using the cyberspace to dictate even our exchange rate, hijacking the role of the CBN.
“They just sit down and fix anything they like. It’s a sabotage and we are trying to prevent that from happening henceforth.”
Onanuga urged Nigerians to stop patronising the parallel market for FX rates, saying the website of the apex bank is the only legal platform.
He said, “The parallel market is not the real gauge of Nigeria’s economic health. The parallel market is an illegal market.
“I don’t even know why Nigerians and the media are feeding on the parallel market. That is not where we should go; what’s the CBN rate? As at Friday, the rate for the dollar was about N1600.
“Even in the so-called parallel market, the exchange rate is stabilizing there and that is what this needs. Our economy is too much dollarised. Importers are looking at the exchange rate and using it to fix prices, some of them arbitrarily, some of them actually profiteering,” he said.
He noted that, once the CBN succeeds in stabilising the exchange rate, the prices of goods in the country will normalise.
“Things are not going to get worse, they are going to get better in the next few weeks,” he said.
Recall that, on Tuesday,the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Olayemi Cardoso, said illicit inflows in the form of crypto exchanges passed through Binance.
Cardoso said, “We are concerned that certain practices go on that indicate illicit flows going through a number of these entities [crypto platforms] and suspicious flows at best.
“In the case of Binance, in the last one year alone, $26bn has passed through Binance Nigeria from sources and users who we cannot adequately identify,” he added.
The CBN governor said anti-corruption agencies, the police and the Office of the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, were co-ordinating an investigation into cryptocurrency exchanges.
Credit: Vanguard News Nigeria