The spokesman for the Northern Elders Forum, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, has said that the redesigning of the naira notes is a demarketing strategy for the All Progressives Congress.
“This money thing is a major demarketing strategy for the APC,” he said on Tuesday during The 2023 Verdict, a Channels Television’s programme.
“If the worst enemy of the APC had designed a strategy for them to lose this election, he couldn’t have chosen a better strategy than this fiasco around the reprinting of the naira,” he added.
“Their own people say it’s all made to make Tinubu lose. The governors say this is designed to make their candidate lose. The candidate himself said it is designed to make him lose.”
Baba-Ahmed said in the northern part of the country, people engage in businesses with very little capital, as low as N5000, saying, “literally, in three-four weeks, you’ve destroyed the informal sector of the economy because there is no cash.”
The NEF spokesman said there was a lot of anger because people were starving.
He advised that old notes and new notes could be allowed to co-exist for the next six months, “but the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), doesn’t listen to anybody.”
The PUNCH reports that the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, has said that there is no need to shift the February 10, 2023 deadline.
He said this during a visit on Tuesday to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to discuss the monetary and currency redesign policy of the bank.
He said, “The situation is substantially calming down since the commencement of over-the-counter payments to complement ATM disbursements and the use of super-agents.
“There is, therefore, no need to consider any shift from the deadline of February 10.”
This comes as the Supreme Court earlier restrained the Federal Government from implementing the February 10 deadline for the currency swap.
