Joseph Inokotong | Abuja, Yusuf Abdulkadir | Ibadan and Ebiowei Lawal | Yenagoa
one week after the Supreme Court ordered that new and old naira notes should circulate together till December 31, many Nigerians are still without cash and are asking their banks and the government to give them access to their money.
There were protests by market women in Bayelsa State on Friday over the cash scarcity.
The reintroduction of the old naira notes by some Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) into the economy has met with stiff resistance by the business community which has rejected the denominations.
In many states across the country, huge numbers of people continue to besiege bank premises in search of cash with many of them asking why banks and the government were denying them access to their money.
Saturday Tribune gathered that some commercial banks are not taking back old notes as deposits.
A bank worker told Saturday Tribune that some banks were paying the old notes out on the basis of ‘collect it but don’t bring it back.’
“My own bank does not dispense old notes because the CBN has not asked us to do so. We also do not take old notes as deposits.
“People who collect old notes from other banks attempt to bring them to us when the paying banks reject them. Of course, we turn them back,” the banker who begged for anonymity told Saturday Tribune on Friday.
A CBN worker also told Saturday Tribune that the new notes were scarce because no one was bringing them back to the banks as deposits while supplies were not as large as they were at the beginning of the exercise.
He also disclosed that a substantial amount of the notes has been destroyed “because many of the notes came in as AD (Awaiting Destruction).”
On Friday in Bayelsa State, traders in Akenfa in Yenagoa Local Government Area blocked the Melford Okilo Road for several hours in protest against the failure of the Federal Government to obey the Supreme Court ruling on the old naira notes.
The traders, mostly women, claimed that banks paid them old naira notes but had refused to accept the old notes as deposits from customers.
One of the traders, Mrs Debora Ebi, said she and her colleagues could not cope with the manner in which the old currencies were being rejected in the state, noting that charges by POS operators on money withdrawals were too high.
She expressed frustration over the continued rejection of the old N500 and N1,000 notes, saying that her inability to carry out transactions had her family into hunger.
Another trader, Madam Tokoni, said some banks which paid out the old naira notes refused to accept them as deposits.
She said: “If I collect old notes from customers, how will I transact business when others won’t receive them? Our families are suffering. There is no food, there are no sales. Why is the government treating us like this?”
A former secretary of the Bayelsa State Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), Mr Alagoa Morris, said: “The situation is a clear case of when elephants fight, the grass suffers. The masses are the main victims, not the elite.
“As a matter of fact, it is sad, unfortunate and very unacceptable. This suffering has reduced Nigerians to a level where they are denied dignity as human beings. There have been avoidable deaths. The continued denial of cash even after the Supreme Court ruling speaks volumes. It shows that this is a country where the rule of law is not practised.”
Risikatu Zubair told Saturday Tribune at Access Bank, Oke Ado, Ibadan, while on an Automated Teller Machine (ATM) queue that she did not know what to make of the apex court’s judgment as the situation remained frustrating.
“They said after the presidential election, there would be enough cash in circulation, but there has been no improvement. New notes or old notes, nothing is available. To eat is very difficult. We are struggling to survive,” she sighed.
Zubair complained that every day, there was mammoth crowd at each of the ATM galleries in her neighbourhood. She pleaded with the government to look into the matter as the suffering was unbearable.
Funmilayo, a nursing mother, lamented that the naira situation was not improving. She recalled going to the bank with her seven-month-old baby during the week only to queue for hours without getting any money.
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