#africanews #binance #nigeria
Just about a year ago, the naira-dollar exchange rate was around 450 - 500 naira per dollar, but right now, it's about 1500 naira per dollar. This has led to triple the prices of food and other commodities including fuel and transport in Nigeria, one of Africa’s biggest economies. Now, what could have happened to make such a drastic change occur? It's simple. There was a change in government. The Presidential election occurred last year in February which brought in a new President, Bola Tinubu. And since he entered, things have gone from bad to worse in Nigeria. In just a few months since he became President, inflation skyrocketed to an all time high, prices of food and basic commodities more than tripled, leading to protests. Instead of looking for a solution to fix the falling value of the Nigerian currency, the government decided to shift the blame, and for some reason, they decided that Binance, a popular cryptocurrency exchange, was the reason why the naira had fallen.
At the time, the naira fell to about 1800 naira per dollar, Bayo Onanuga, the President's adviser on information and strategy, accused Nigerian citizens of being unpatriotic for trading naira for cryptocurrency and added that “Crypto should be banned in our country or else this bleeding of our currency will continue unabated.” It seems the President took the advice of his adviser because afterwards, the government accused Binance of manipulating foreign exchange rates through currency speculation and rate-fixing. The government also accused Binance of tax evasion and money laundering. Specifically, the authorities mentioned that Binance moved $26 billion out of the country illegally. For this reason, they demanded that Binance send officials from the company to discuss the accusations. The company responded by sending two officials, Tigran Gambaryan and Nadeem Anjarwalla to discuss the issue with the Nigerian authorities. However, the meeting deadlocked when Nigerian officials demanded access to customer data of Binance’s Nigerian users, which the pair declined to provide. And, at the end of the day, both executives were detained by the Nigerian authorities over allegations that Binance had turned a blind eye to criminal offenses including tax evasion and money laundering.