Naira scarcity and a life of queueing in Nigeria

In 1950s New York, building managers quickly realised that people queuing to use the elevators were becoming increasingly angsty and were given to intemperance. They had to find a solution and soon realised it wasn’t so much the queuing but the perceived time spent in line that got people irritated. So, they came up with […]

In 1950s New York, building managers quickly realised that people queuing to use the elevators were becoming increasingly angsty and were given to intemperance. They had to find a solution and soon realised it wasn’t so much the queuing but the perceived time spent in line that got people irritated. So, they came up with two ingenious solutions. One was to install floor indicators to show the progress of the elevator to those waiting. The second was installing floor-to-ceiling mirrors to keep those waiting distracted. 

How one wishes that the people running Nigeria have any kind of consideration for Nigerians who spend hundreds of hours in queues for things no one should be queuing for. Some say it is part of being Nigerian, a country that requires a specific set of skills to navigate.  

You see, Nigeria has certain peculiarities. Some are beautiful and unique; like the culture, the range and diversity of it, the people and their rambunctious, resilient spirit and will to triumph. The others are dark and gritty and mostly, almost always, self-inflicted. 

Take for instance this torment of creating artificial scarcity and unnecessary queues that Nigerians are subjected to time and again. Queues are created by scarcity for things we have in excess, like fuel, or things that should be easily available, like voters’ cards. 

Except you have been living on Mars the last few weeks or months, or maybe a whole year or two, you have been queuing up for fuel, and you had to spend hours queuing to get your NIN or your voter’s card. But now, of all the things in the world, Nigerians are being made to spend hours queuing to access their own money. 

Let’s not forget that, depending on where you live, you spend hours in a slow-moving queue just to get home. It is called a traffic jam and is a thing for people living in Lagos and Abuja and every mid-level city in this country. Sometimes, you get to the source point of the traffic jam only to discover it was some traders displaying their wares on the roadside, narrowing the road, or some cars randomly parking to drop off or pick up passengers in the middle of the road. Other times, it is two drivers stopping mid-transit to box it out because one brushed the other’s car. Self-inflicted. 

It is a widely talked-about rite of passage as a Lagosian to have to shop for groceries to make a soup entirely while caught in traffic—fresh fish, ewedu and other vegetables, there will be a butcher with choice cuts of beef, mutton or goat and ponmo and there will always be the person with the tomatoes and pepper, seasoning and locust beans. 

Imagine a situation where one spends two hours in traffic to get to a filling station, where one then spends five hours in the queue only to drive to the bank to spend another two and half hours to withdraw one’s own money, then drive to an INEC office to spend three hours to get your voter’s card only to be confronted by an INEC official who insists you have to pay her to get your card. 

We all saw that trending video of an INEC official in Enugu demanding N1,000 from each individual before handing out their voter’s card, didn’t we? (INEC needs to have this woman arrested and prosecuted and must be seen to do so.) 

The Central Bank, after much rigmarole and denial when it is clear their plans to roll out the redesigned naira notes were chaotic and unfeasible, agreed to extend the deadline to absorb the old notes by some 10 days.  

That rush to transition from the old banknotes might be deliberate to catch out the big money looters and hoarders, but in the end, the people paying the price are innocent Nigerians. The CBN has bizarrely created a naira scarcity. A scarcity that has provided opportunities for some people. Some banks are accused of having sold the new banknotes to people who can afford to buy it. The DSS arrested currency traders working in cahoots with bank officials to sell the new naira notes. 

In both instances of the INEC and the banks, human culpability cannot be ruled out, when some individuals or groups create the scarcity to profit from it. But these individuals cannot operate outside the chaotic system that the institutions enable and the government agencies need to admit their reprehensible failings in this constant torment of Nigerians. 

Each time a government agency decides to embark on a project like this, it fails to study and learn from the failings of previous exercises by sister agencies. 

In 2020, amid the pandemic, the Ministry of Communication and Digital Economy suddenly, out of the blue, announced a decision to link NINs with SIM cards and gave Nigerians an ultimatum of two weeks to register or have their SIMs blocked. 

In a country of 200 million people, it was clear that the decision was ill-thought and inoperable. It would have been reasonable if the modalities had been properly worked out to ensure people don’t rush to the NIMC offices all at once but that wasn’t the case. Millions of Nigerians turned up and NIMC and its staff struggled to cope with the sheer numbers. The deadline was extended several times and now three years down the line and with nearly a 100 million Nigerians having linked their NIN to their SIMs, it is impossible to tell exactly what that exercise has achieved. The crime that the ministry said it would curtail by the linkages has not abated. There has been no prominent arrest of a kidnapper or terrorist to justify the suffering. 

And then INEC took over with a rolling voter registration exercise that should have worked effectively. Over a longer period, Nigerians registered. Yet, when it was time to issue these cards, which technically technology allows to be printed instantly, but hey, this is Nigeria, we have to do things in stages, we ended up with hundreds of Nigerians returning to INEC offices to spend cumulatively hundreds of man hours to get voters’ card that should be arriving in their mails.  

Ordinarily, this should be a project that INEC should partner with the NIPOST, if it is still working. Have NIPOST deliver these cards to people’s addresses and use a tracking system to update both the receiver and INEC. That way, both agencies discharge their key duties and Nigerians don’t need to waste time tussling to collect these cards. 

And then, perhaps the most bizarre, the Central Bank decided it is recolouring the naira, made a dog meal of the job based on the ‘redesign’, the sloppy cutting of the naira and worst of all, the rollout process. It gave itself a short window to pull out the old notes and gave Nigerians an even shorter time frame to access the new notes. 

Even after the original deadline lapsed, many Nigerians have still not seen any of the new notes in real life and earlier on, those who had it and went to spend it were greeted with shock and accusations of trying to pull a con on store owners who were not sensitised to the new notes coming out.  

Add to this fact, that we have had a fuel scarcity that has been going on for a full year now and the minister of petroleum, who happens to be the president, has not bothered to say a word to Nigerians about the situation.  

No one is going to be considerate to install a floor counter or floor-to-ceiling mirror for Nigerians in perpetual queues and frustrated Nigerians have protested and pelted the president with stones in Kano and Katsina in recent visits. I don’t expect that would change anything but this habitual waste of people’s time and dehumanisation ought to stop. Right now.