Featuring on a Channels TV programme on Wednesday, the presidential adviser, said, “If we don’t clamp down on Binance, Binance will destroy the economy of this country. They just fix the rate.”
Cryptocurrency trading website Binance, if not stopped will destroy the Nigerian economy because of the way it arbitrarily fixes foreign exchange rates, the Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Information & Strategy, Bayo Onanuga has said.
Featuring on a Channels TV programme on Wednesday, the presidential adviser, said, “If we don’t clamp down on Binance, Binance will destroy the economy of this country. They just fix the rate.”
SaharaReporters reported earlier that two employees of Binance were detained by the Nigerian Security Forces in Abuja on Monday night as part of an investigation into the cryptocurrency exchange's operations in Nigeria.
Their detention in Nigeria was in an attempt to curb naira speculation and steady its free fall by clamping down on cryptocurrency exchanges.
But Onanuga while featuring on the programme, stated, “We have saboteurs," citing what Binance was allegedly doing to Nigeria's economy.
Justifying the recent ban on Binance in the country, Onanuga said that is “why the government moved against Binance”.
He continued, “Some people sit down using the cyberspace to dictate even our exchange rate, hijacking the role of the CBN (Central Bank of Nigeria).
“They just sit down and fix anything they like. It’s a sabotage and we are trying to prevent that from happening henceforth.”
He appealed to Nigerians to stop patronising the parallel market for FX rates, adding that “the parallel market is not the real gauge of Nigeria’s economic health. The parallel market is an illegal market".
He maintained that the website of the apex bank is the only legal platform.
“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 lamented.
According to him, 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 noted.
Nigeria has been facing a forex crisis that has seen the naira depreciate to a record low. This and the removal of subsidy by the government have pushed up the prices of goods and services and caused hardship in the country.
The value of the naira was about N700/$1 last May but it currently hovers around N1600/$1.
The authorities have been clamping down on cryptocurrency exchanges and Bureaux de Change.
On Tuesday, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Olayemi Cardoso, said $26 billion passed through Binance Nigeria from unknown sources and users in one year.
SaharaReporters reported that he stated this in Abuja at the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting of the apex bank, the first since he assumed office in September 2023.
Cardoso said the government was “concerned that certain practices go on that indicate illicit flows going through a number of these entities, and suspicious flows at best”.
He continued, “In the case of Binance, in the last one year alone, $26 billion has passed through Binance Nigeria from sources and users who we cannot adequately identify.
“There is a lot that is going on now as a result of collaboration between the different agencies which include the EFCC (Economic and Financial Crimes Commission), the police and of course the office of the NSA (National Security Adviser) and in due course as we progress and have more information to share, we will certainly share and suffice to say we are determined to do everything it takes to ensure that we take charge of our market or put differently, do not allow others to manipulate our market in a way that ends up distortionary and sub-optimizes for all Nigerians.
“We will not accept it and we will do everything possible to prevent any of these kinds of infractions from taking place.”