Sokoto State Governor, Aminu Tambuwal, who is also the head of the Nigeria Governors Forum, and Abubakar Bagudu, the head of the Progressive Governors Forum, met with President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday at the Presidential Villa in Abuja.
The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, and the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Mr. Abdulrasheed Bawa, also attended the meeting, which was called at the President’s request.
The Chief of Staff to the President, Prof. Ibrahim Gambari, and the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Mr. Boss Mustapha, were also present at the meeting.
Feelers suggested that the meeting with the president may not have been unrelated to the cash shortage brought on by the CBN’s Naira redesign policy, even if the specifics of the meeting had not yet been made public at the time this report was filed.
After the first deadline of December 31 set by the country’s top bank for the swap of the old notes with the new notes, there has been outrage in the country over the shortage of the naira notes.
Unprecedented misery has ensued from the occurrence as throngs of Nigerians struggle to obtain naira notes to meet their urgent necessities.
President Muhammadu Buhari and Governors were supposed to meet under the auspices of the Nigerian Governors Forum, or NGF, but that meeting has been postponed.
The meeting that was initially planned to take place on Tuesday in the Council Chambers of the Presidential Villa in Abuja has been canceled without explanation.
The president asked Nigerians to give him seven days to engage with the appropriate parties to settle the impasse around the naira redesign strategy, which led to the cancellation of the meeting with governors four days later.
The currency exchange program, which aims to stop money laundering, election fraud, rising inflation rates, and counterfeiting, had elicited a range of responses.
On Monday, Kaduna, Kogi and Zamfara states filed a lawsuit seeking a restraining order against the federal government to prevent the full implementation of the naira redesign program, which has caused a cash shortage.
However, 14 registered political parties were successful in getting a court injunction prohibiting the federal government and the CBN from postponing the February 10 deadline for the naira exchange a few hours after the three governors’ lawsuit became public.