Senator Ali Ndume has criticised the planned relocation of some Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) offices from Abuja to Lagos, but believes President Bola Tinubu’s administration would overturn the decision.
Banking Supervision (DBS), Other Financial Institutions Supervision (OFISD), Consumer Protection Department (CPD), Payment System Management Department (PSMD), and Financial Policy Regulations Department (FPRD) are among the CBN departments set to be relocated.
But Ndume, who represents Borno South, has kicked against the plan, citing several reasons.
“The regulators of the financial institutions are in Abuja. You want to move because you say Lagos is the commercial capital. This is one of the mistakes and I am sure Mr President will reverse it because it does not work,” he said on Tuesday’s edition of Channels Television’s Politics Today.
According to him, while proponents of the move are citing more commercial activities going on in Lagos, such an argument does not hold water. He wondered why all oil exploration companies did not have their activities moved to the oil-producing Niger Delta region.
He maintained that the planned relocation was ill-advised, saying, “It does not work that way. But I am very sure that Mr President will look at this. He is a nationalist and not just a Lagos boy.”
Ndume is not the only one to have faulted the relocation. Some days back, the Arewa Consultative Forum, a socio-political group in northern Nigeria, also kicked against it.
The Forum argued that the CBN’s decision rather than being a normal administrative action to fix some logistics problem is a disturbing pattern of antagonistic actions often taken by certain Federal Government agencies against the interests of the north and other parts of the country noting that northerners will be affected by the spontaneous exercise.