Prior to the governorship and House of Assembly elections, the CBN and the EFCC have been urged to crack down on the use of illicit funds. This request comes from the NGO Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA Resource Centre).
This is contained in a statement that was given to newsmen on Sunday in Lagos and signed by Mr. Olanrewaju Suraj, Chairman, HEDA.
Suraju commented in light of the Supreme Court decision from Friday, March 3, which rejected the CBN’s Naira redesign programme.
According to Suraju, regulatory agencies must exercise caution to deter politicians from using the judgment to perfect vote buying in the elections on March 11
Suraju claimed that the new strategy will make it more difficult to fight corruption and insurgency in the nation by allowing the circulation of obsolete Naira notes as legal cash.
“With the Supreme Court judgment delivered that the old notes continue to be legal tender, the Central Bank and other financial institutions must swing into action and deploy some measures to track and counterfeit illicit money flow transactions by corrupt politicians and their allies.
“Improved scrutiny should be intensified by the Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit and the EFCC to track bank officials, estate managers and Bureau de Changes for suspicious movement of toxic funds within and outside the financial institutions.
He claimed that Nigerians who hoped to gain from the new Naira redesigned policy and the associated suffering that came with its execution had to go through unspeakable hardships, and we were just now starting to get used to the cashless policy regime.
Such hardships shouldn’t be in vain, he continued.
With the availability of old Naira notes compared to what was seen during the Presidential elections, he claimed that vote-buying might be more common than expected.
He argued that the EFCC should continue its admirable work to prevent politicians from using vote-buying strategies to tamper with the fairness of the electoral process.
