The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has declared that Bureau de Changes (BDCs) were funding terrorism and kidnapping in the country.
Governor of the CBN, Godwin Emefiele, made this disclosure in Abuja on Friday after the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) Meeting. He said the CBN will not rescind its decision to ban the sale of foreign exchange to BDCs.
Shedding more light on why the apex bank took the the decision, Emefiele noted the CBN has resolved to stop funding BDCs by dipping into the nation’s foreign reserve to fund BDCs all for the sake of stabilising the forex market.
According to him: “We have decided that this will stop and it has stopped for good. It beats my imagination that Nigeria carried on with this kind of practice that tended to support illegal activities of people who are involved in graft and involved in corrupt practices”.
He added: “Instead of collecting naira as bribe you tell the person to exchange it to dollar so that you can have some packet of dollars in your pocket. Yet the CBN in an attempt to moderate the market decides that it will take dollars and beings to support the corrupt tendencies of people”.
Another reason for the decision, he said, is “we have unwittingly supported activities of those who illegally buy foreign exchange from this illegal market carry them in aircrafts out of the country and go to buy arms and ammunition and bring them back into the country and conduct crime whether it is Boko haram, kidnapping all sorts of nefarious activities.
“We the CBN take our country’s dollar and sell to people to go and buy arms ammunition to come and hurt us that is what we are saying that people want us to continue to do. We cannot do that any longer”.