Former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Charles Soludo has called on the Federal Government to scrap the multiple exchange rates in the country.
Soludo said this in Lagos while fielding questions from journalists shortly after an event organised by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria where he was the Chairman of the Economic Discourse.
Soludo said policymakers must get the country out of the current multiple exchange rates’ regime and reduce the wide spread between the official and parallel market exchange rates.
He said; “With regards to exchange rate, I can see quite some changes in the last few weeks. I think some steps are beginning to be taken, but it is still quite a long way to go to get to a stable and predictable level that eliminates the premium among the multiplicity of exchange rates.
“Nigeria must get out of multiple exchange rates and we must eliminate the premium, get it back on track at a competitive exchange rate regime. The uncertainty that is created by that is so enormous; and with the oil price rising and with the increase in oil earnings, this is the time to take bold steps and do the needful.”
“It was easy to eliminate the multiple exchange rates and close the gap because it has been done before”.
“On bold steps, the template is not too far. We have done it before and it is just going back to it. If it (the template) is not broken, why mend it? Get back and eliminate the multiple exchange rate regime, eliminate the premium, or at least significantly reduce it to not more than between three to maximum of five per cent premium between the parallel and official exchange rates.
“On what it takes to do it, that is basically known. Get the public finance okay; I can tell you that with the momentum of what is going on in the rest of the world, by the end of this year, we should actually be having stocks of reserves in the range of about $50bn or $60bn.”
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