The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the National Orientation Agency have entered into a partnership to take the sensitization campaign on the acceptability of the newly designed naira notes to the grassroots.
The partnership was followed by a meeting between the two government agencies where the CBN educated NOA staff and state directors on the reasons why the bank redesigned the naira notes.
In his opening remarks, the Director General of NOA, Dr Garba Abari said the partnership is coming at a time when misunderstanding and misconception are affecting the naira redesign policy.
“The bottom line is to capacitate our state directors through this meeting, it might not be a one-off meeting, but when the capacity is built the staff here will also take the knowledge they gather and transfer it down to the states and local governments for relevant dissemination to where it matters most.
“It is in this respect that I crave the indulgence of all state Directors to please pay attention to the resource persons and ask whatever is discovered to be a grey area so that what we are taking to the people exactly represents what the CBN wants the people to know.
“We are happy that this partnership is coming at this time because I have just a practical experience about how this naira policy affects the people down communities. I had reasons to have a transaction, what is very clear in the rural communities is that they do not even trust the policy at all, if you give them the redesigned naira note, some take it with a lot of hesitation, while others don’t take it at all”, Dr Abari stated.
Director of Currency Operations of the CBN, Ahmed Umar during his presentation, said the CBN Act gives the apex bank the right to redesign the naira with the approval of the President.
“Under the CBN Act, we have sufficient legislation to back our action. Section 17 of CBN Act gave the sole right of issuing notes and coins to the CBN, section 19 says the denomination in form of currency notes and coins or any form medium that is considered as currency is covered by that section, so once the president approves, the CBN is good to go to produce a new note.
“In many countries of the world, it takes a few years to change currency note design, in our case, what we had was basically over 20 years of having the same design of note. So, over that period what it did to us is to just create an avenue for people to master the act of counterfeiting the note”, he said.
While explaining why the bank redesigned the naira notes, Umar said a large volume of the naira is hoarded in individual houses, leaving the banks to control a very little volume of the currency. He also said that 99 per cent of counterfeited naira are found in the N500 and N1000 denominations. He said the abuse of the currency is also part of the reasons why the bank redesigned some notes.
“There is a large volume of notes outside the system, as at October 26th 2022, out of a total volume of N3.23 trillion currencies in circulation, N2.7 trillion is outside the banking system. So, technically is to say that 85 per cent of the volume of notes we have were not under the visibility of the banks including the CBN, we only had control of 15 per cent of it.
“We realised that N500 and N1000 notes constitute more than 99 per cent of currency that was being targeted for counterfeiting”, he added.
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