ON Saturday, March 11, Mr. Oluwole Taiwo, alias Baba Bintin L’aye, a popular radio host working at the Ibadan, Oyo State-based private radio station, Fresh FM, reportedly collapsed on the way to the station for his Saturday morning show. Taking off from the Amuloko area of Ibadan, he headed to Fresh FM located in the Challenge area of the city, hoping to find a Point Of Sale (POS) agent on the way. The sad incident was apparently due to exhaustion, the presenter having trekked a long distance in the futile search for cash to take care of the day’s obligations. The inability to take public transport on account of the persisting cash crunch in the country had taken a terrible toll. Baba Bintin L’aye, one of the casualties of the Federal Government’s naira redesign policy, breathed his last looking for cash, a metaphor for governmental incompetence. His crime was being a Nigerian.
The country has, in the recent months, been going through a naira redesign policy that surreptitiously morphed into the denial of citizens’ fundamental human rights to access their hard-earned cash deposits. The government told them that it wanted to abrogate the pernicious practice of voter inducement, but ended up confiscating their cash. To say the very least, the naira redesign policy has brought untold and avoidable hardship and trauma to citizens. Nigerians have been thoroughly dehumanised. Apart from the lives lost, countless businesses have been ruined, many of them irreparably. Only recently, it was reported that the economy had already lost N29 trillion to the policy even as many citizens died looking for the elusive cash with which to survive governmental terror.
This is yet another reflection of the sad consequences of government incompetence and ineffectiveness. It is hard to believe that the government could subject Nigerians, for the past three months and still counting, to inability to cash their own deposits in banks because of a naira redesigning exercise/cashless policy that has proved tragically expensive! In which other clime could a government subject citizens to such unnecessary hardship and suffering and still with no indication of what it intends to do to ease the situation months after? Nigerians have been witnesses to orders and counter orders by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the president and even the Supreme Court on this issue of availability of currency for months now without any clarity and sense of direction. It is as if the disparate structures of government are simply playing games with the life and sustenance of Nigerians. Their actions have not lifted the pall of suffering on the people.
It is hard to understand the logic behind the exercise which has aggravated poverty. It remains unclear what the goals of the policy really are apart from comprehensive public punishment. Surely, Nigerians cannot continue putting up with this sad state of affairs indefinitely. It is time the government straightened things out with respect to the persisting cash crunch, lest it precipitates a collapse of the social order. Its primary duty is protection of life and property and pursuing the welfare of the citizenry. Whatever policy makes life difficult for people and dehumanises them is, to say the least, criminal. In this regard, President Muhammadu Buhari’s call for patience and sacrifice from Nigerians following the hardship the policy has inflicted on them smacks of leadership insensitivity.
For weeks, Nigerians were subjected to frustration, shock and disbelief. They found it hard to accept that the CBN Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, could compound the woes they had experienced over the last eight years of the Buhari presidency, during which the CBN governor himself even became political at the threshold of party primaries for presidential candidates. In any case, the bankers said to have hoarded cash were not punished, meaning that Nigerians had suffered for nothing. Nigerians definitely deserve unreserved apologies from Buhari and Emefiele. May the souls of Baba Bintin L’aye and other victims rest in sweet repose.
