Our reporter/ Two senior executives at Binance have been detained in Nigeria as the country cracks down on cryptocurrency exchanges. LP
The executives flew to Nigeria following the country’s decision to ban several cryptocurrency trading websites last week but they were detained by the office of the country’s national security adviser and their passports seized, according to various reports
Binance has not commented on the development.
The crackdown follows a period after several cryptocurrency websites emerged as platforms of choice for trading the Nigerian currency, which has suffered chronic dollar shortages.
The naira’s official exchange rate has been trading at levels close to the parallel market level after the currency was devalued last month, its second adjustment in less than a year.
Meanwhile, presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, has defended the clampdown on the outfit, stating that if not stopped, cryptocurrency trading website Binance will destroy the Nigerian economy by arbitrarily fixing foreign exchange rate.
“If we don’t clamp down on Binance, Binance will destroy the economy of this country. They just fix the rate,” a displeased Onanuga said on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme on Wednesday.
If we don’t clamp down on Binance, Binance will destroy the economy of this country. They just fix the rate.
“We have saboteurs. Look at what Binance is doing to our economy. That is why the government moved against Binance. Some people sit down using the cyberspace to dictate even our exchange rate, hijacking the role of the CBN.
“They just sit down and fix anything they like. It’s a sabotage and we are trying to prevent that from happening henceforth,” he stated.
Onanuga further urged Nigerians to stop patronising the parallel market for FX rates, saying the website of the apex bank is the only legal platform.
“The parallel market is not the real gauge of Nigeria’s economic health. The parallel market is an illegal market.
“I don’t even know why Nigerians and the media are feeding on the parallel market. That is not where we should go; what’s the CBN rate? As at Friday, the rate for the dollar was about N1600.
“Even in the so-called parallel market, the exchange rate is stabilizing there and that is what this needs. Our economy is too much dollarised. Importers are looking at the exchange rate and using it to fix prices, some of them arbitrarily, some of them actually profiteering,” Onanuga stated.
According to him, once the CBN succeeds in stabilising the exchange rate, the prices of goods in the country will normalise. “Things are not going to get worse, they are going to get better in the next few weeks,” he noted.
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