Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has alleged that the scarcity of naira notes was a part of the plots to disrupt the forthcoming general elections in order to ensure the emergence of an interim government.
El-Rufai said the current cash scarcity was designed to ensure that the All Progressives Congress, presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, loses the election.
The governor stated this during a state broadcast on Thursday night after President Muhammadu Buhari said in his national broadcast earlier in the day that both the N1,000 and N500 old naira notes are no longer legal tender.
He said, “It is important for the people of Kaduna State, and indeed Nigeria, to know that contrary to the public pronouncements and apparent good intentions, this policy was conceived and sold to the President by officials who completely lost out in the Gubernatorial and Presidential Primaries of the APC in June 2022.
“Once Asiwaju Bola Tinubu emerged as the candidate in June 2022, and subsequently did not pick one of them as his running mate, this currency redesign policy was conceived to ensure that the APC presidential candidate is deprived of what they alleged is a humongous war chest.”
“They also sought to achieve any one or more of following objectives: Create a nationwide shortage of cash so that citizens are incited to vote against APC candidates across the board resulting in massive losses for the party in all the elections.
“Ensure that the cash crunch is so serious, along with the contrived and enduring fuel shortage existing since September 2022, that the 2023 Elections do not hold at all, leading to an Interim National Government to be led by a retired Army General,” he claimed.
The governor also said the order by President Buhari, on the deadline for old notes “is a disobedience to the Supreme Court Order.”
The governor asked residents of the state to continue using the old naira notes.
However, in his broadcast to the people of Kaduna State, El-rufai urged them to stand up strongly for democracy, peace and national unity.
“It is also quite revealing that the Federal Government and its agencies not only disobeyed the February 8 ruling by continuing to say the February 10 deadline stands. It is shocking to see the blatant violation of the subsisting and continuing order of the Supreme Court that all the old and new notes should continue to be legal tender until it gives judgment in the case filed by the Kaduna State Government along with several others.”
El-Rufai said, “The address by the President earlier this morning limiting the legal tender status of old notes to only N200 amounts to total disregard and disobedience of the ruling of February 8 which was extended further yesterday by the Supreme Court. The misguided action of the Attorney-General to mislead the President into engaging in this public violation of the order of the highest court of the land shows how desperate the policy architects are to cause national chaos, by showing open contempt for the judiciary.”