Presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, has warned that if not stopped, cryptocurrency trading website Binance will destroy the Nigerian economy by arbitrarily fixing foreign exchange rates.
Onanuga said this on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme on Wednesday.
He said, “If we don’t clamp down on Binance, Binance will destroy the economy of this country.
“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 cyberspace to dictate even our exchange rate, hijacking the role of the CBN.
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“They just sit down and fix anything they like. It’s sabotage, and we are trying to prevent that from happening henceforth.”
The presidential aide additionally encouraged Nigerians to refrain from patronising the parallel market for foreign exchange rates, emphasizing that the website of the central bank is the sole authorized platform.
“The parallel market is not the real gauge of Nigeria’s economic health. It 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 of Friday, the rate for the dollar was about N1600.
“Even within the so-called parallel market, the exchange rate is stabilizing there, and that is what this needs. Our economy is too dollarized. Importers are looking at the exchange rate and using it to fix prices, some of them arbitrarily, some of them profiteering,” he stated.
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.