The announcement of the ban of Binance and other cryptocurrency exchanges is nothing new.
Remember, they were banned in Nigeria by Emefiele long ago.
Indeed, Emefy went ahead to punish a few FI's who broke through the backdoor to deal with the crypto speculators.
But when Tinubu assumed duty, he rolled back the crypto ban, opened the gates for the speculators, and pushed our economy into uncharted territory.
He also decreed the full float of our Naira without any guardrails pari passu the full throttle deregulation of fuel import scheme without any safeguards.
The consequence was the spike in FX rates and attendant runaway inflation which has rendered every Nigerian 75% poorer and reduced the value of our currency by 75% too.
Now that the gamble has spectacularly failed and they are trying to return us to where they took us from, some yahoo-yahoo analyst is out, trying to spin that Tinubu has found an answer to a question he intentionally and recklessly created ab initio.
Under PMB, the FX market was administered using managed float. Right now, we are back to managed float, after the experiment of full-float failed. Under PMB, subsidy was paid for fuel imports. Today, we are back fully to paying subsidies on imported fuel, after the initial gragra failed. PMB inherited the USD at around N200 and got us to around N450 in eight years. Cardi B & Co took up the baton at N450 and throttled us to N1,900 before the recent moderation to N1,400 which has triggered this Yahoo analysis. In ten months!
The stubborn character of data makes this present spin difficult to sustain. No doubt the intentions may have been noble when these decisions were. made. However, there was a demonstrable lack of rigor and deep thinking in executing the agenda. As a result, we are all poorer today by a factor of not less than 60% than we were a year ago.
Worse, we can't ever recover back to the bad old Buhari days. Never!!!
So what is there to celebrate? Starlink internet equipment which I bought at N380,000 two months ago, sells for N1.2 million today. A three-year-old Toyota RAV4 car which cost N19 million four months ago goes for N50 million today. A new Honda CRV car which was N48 million in December 2023 is now N82 million. Yet my salary of 2022 is still exactly my salary today.
So what's all the hype for???