The apex bank’s decision on Sunday followed clamours by Nigerians including stakeholders, the 36 state governors, the Nigerian Bar Association, the Arewa Consultative Forum and bank customers, for a review of the policy and an extension of the January 31 deadline.
Reacting to the development, President, Association of Capital Market Academics of Nigeria and the country’s first professor of Capital Market, Uche Uwaleke, who spoke with our correspondent via telephone on Sunday, said the extension of the deadline by the CBN till February 10 portrayed the CBN as a responsive organisation that was sensitive to the yearnings of Nigerians.
“The revision of the cash withdrawal limits confirms that the apex bank is following up issues and means well for Nigerians.
“This deadline extension will reduce the queues at the ATM, reduce panic and uncertainty among small business owners in remote areas and more importantly, allow more time for the new naira notes to circulate while the old ones returned to the CBN given that about N900 billion is still outside the banks as revealed by the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele”, he said.
Uwaleke also stressed that the new deadline was slated before the February 25 presidential election to reduce vote-buying and to discourage the current practice of rejection of the old notes even though they were still legal tenders.
He commended the CBN for the move as well as the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), for giving approval for the extension.
In his own reaction, an investment banker and Chief Executive Officer, Taurus Capital Limited, Dr Nnaemeka Obiaraeri, opined that the monetary conversion policy was a laudable one as it had helped to reduce the rate at which kidnappers endlessly demanded huge amounts of money to release their victims.
Obiaraeri maintained that it had also frustrated the politicians hoarding money to buy votes in the forthcoming election, saying they had an option to deposit their old notes or lose everything to the policy.
“The records by the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation, National Bureau of Statistics and CBN show that over 133 million multidimensional poor Nigerians and over 178 million Nigerians do not earn more than N60,000 per month and do not have enough to feed in a day with the level of the country’s economic inflation”, he said.
He, therefore, encouraged the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Department of State Services and Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, among others to keep close tab on all the branch managers, regional managers, heads of operations, CEOs and key relationship managers of the deposit money banks in Nigeria by putting 24/7 surveillance around them in order to help stop any hanky-panky action capable of sabotaging the efforts of policy.
“The CBN should also engage KPMG Advisory Services, PWC, and Deloitte to conduct a quick random sampled crash audit within the next seven days to ascertain what commercial banks did with the old notes deposited and the new ones disbursed to them by the apex bank,” he added.
Emefiele while speaking on the extension said the CBN had got N1.7 trillion worth of old naira notes so far, with N500 billion more to go.
The CBN governor was however silent on how much cash would be left outside the banking system with the naira redesign.
