Last Friday, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, confirmed that it was evacuating banknotes from its vaults to commercial banks across the country as part of a coordinated effort to ease the circulation of banknotes of various denominations.
In view of that directive, the apex bank instructed all commercial banks to open to the banking public on Saturdays and Sundays, beginning from this weekend.
CBN’s Acting Director, of Corporate Communications Isa AbdulMumin, who disclosed this in Abuja, stated that a substantial amount of money, in various denominations, had been received by the commercial banks for onward circulation to their respective customers.
According to him, the CBN had directed all banks to load their Automated Teller Machines, ATMs, as well as conduct physical operations in the banking halls throughout the weekends.
He said that branches of commercial banks will operate on Saturdays and Sundays to attend to customers’ cash needs, adding CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele, would personally lead teams to monitor the level of compliance by the banks in various locations across the country. AbdulMumin urged Nigerians to be patient as the current situation would ease soon with the injection of more banknotes into circulation.
So, did the CBN directive ease the Naira crunch this weekend?
One could understand the urgency and rush among the banking public to test if the banks would really open on Saturday and Sunday to dispense cash to them across the counter or from the ATMs. Many customers thronged banks branches to see if they could obtain the elusive Naira notes. It was not an easy endeavour for many. For many it was an exercise in futility – same old, same old, as in previous week days!
For one, not many of the branches of banks were open or ready for the exercise on Saturday so customers had to move from one to the other to see where notes were being dispensed. It was basically the same crowded and long queues that they had seen since the Naira change ‘wahala’ began. For many members of the public, this was to be expected since the CBN notice was made just the previous day and the banks would have needed to make preparations after all they had been through in the last two months. Secondly, it was doubtful from the beginning if all branches of all Deposit Money Banks would have received cash from the CBN in the short time from when the announcement was made to date of implementation.
This new week will be a deciding one for the long-suffering bank customers who expect that the CBN has no choice but to flood the system with both old and new notes to remove the cash shortage and let us spend our hard-earned money again, without having to buy the cash at the price of our pound of flesh from Shylock POS operators.
At this point, nobody cares whether they are old or new Naira notes, dirty and mutilated or mint.
Just give us our cash!
