FACT CHECKER: Emefiele lied on dom accounts

Godwin Emefiele, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), claimed on Monday that Nigeria is the only country “in the world” that allows its citizens to operate domiciliary accounts.

What, in the world, was he talking about?

“I am telling you that citizens of other countries are not allowed to operate domiciliary accounts. Nigeria is so free that people are able to do anything that they want to do,” he told THISDAY in the interview.

He was trying to defend the decision of Nigerian banks to stop receiving foreign currency deposits, an action that seems to be boosting the value of the naira in the parallel markets.

But Emefiele spectacularly got his fact wrong.

At the risk of free advertisement, we ask him to click this link to open an account with HSBC in the UK — in any major international currency of his choice.

If he doesn’t really like HSBC for some reason, he can choose Lloyds Bank. They are also in need of foreign currencies, in addition to the British pound. TSB, Santander UK, RBS, Nationwide, NatWest — absolutely no bank wants to be left out.

Or Emefiele prefers Barclays? This screenshot tells him a bit about its services. He should pay attention to the yellow highlight.

America will never be left out, as we all can guess, and Citi Bank could well be Emefiele’s first port-of-call. It has a product named “Foreign Currency Account and Multi Currency Account” for, erm, foreign currencies!

Emefiele would be able to pay and receive in any of the following: Australian dollars, Canadian dollars, Czech koruna, Danish krone, the euro, Great British pound, Hong Kong dollars, Hungarian forint, Israeli shekels, Japanese yen and New Zealand dollar.

Others are Norwegian krona, Polish zloty, Romanian lei, Russian rubles, South African rand, Swedish krona, Swiss francs, Turkish lira, United Arab Emirates dirham and, of course, the irresistible US dollar.

Unfortunately, the naira is not one of the currencies. Maybe Emefiele can spend more energy on that in the next three years.

A Nigerian-born British banker told TheCable: “As a banking practitioner with almost 10 years experience in the UK, there is nothing remotely close to what the CBN governor said. A bank customer with the domiciliary account equivalent in the UK can pay USD cash into their foreign currency/domiciliary account. This is the practice from when I started banking in the UK 10 years ago and continues to be the practice even today.

“The only issue is with money laundering.  Once the bank is certain your cash is not linked with the proceed of crime, they will take it from you and bank it.”

The CBN, in a newspaper advert on Tuesday, tried to come to Emefiele’s rescue by adding “without proper documentation” to his statement, as if you can just walk into any bank in the world and deposit money without “proper documentation”.

Of course, you have to fill forms to deposit cash.

Maybe Emefiele wanted to say: “There is no country in the world that allows its citizens to operate domiciliary accounts. The citizens are only allowed to operate foreign currency accounts. I hereby order Nigerians to start operating foreign currency accounts instead of domiciliary accounts.”

Luckily, Emefiele has promised to “investigate”. Hopefully, no committee will be set up to do that.

He should just calm down and ask Google.