Central Bank of Nigeria Governor (CBN) Olayemi Cardoso has blamed the current economic hardship on the poor handling of the nation’s economy between 2015 and 2023.
President Muhammadu Buhari’s government, according to Cardoso, printed N35 trillion that resulted in a huge amount of money in circulation that translated to too much money chasing the same amount of goods.
The CBN Governor said the current administration came “into a very loose money supply situation.”
According to him, the past eight years witnessed an incredible amount of pumping of liquidity into the system, a reason, he said, largely caused the spike in inflation rate and nationwide economic hardship.
“In 2015, money supply was about N19 trillion. And in 2023, it was N54 trillion. That’s a huge increase, a very, very huge increase, and a substantial amount of that was through Ways and Means,” Mr Cardoso said at a media briefing to disclose the decisions of the September edition of Monetary Policy Committee meeting of the apex bank in Abuja.
The CBN Governor stated that the while the economy, on average, was growing at 1.2 percent during that time, the money supply was growing at 12.6 percent.
He also blamed the situation on the collapse of the prices of oil and exchange rate fluctuation.
