Why redesigning the naira is not a priority

It is basically futile getting a Nigerian government to reverse an unpopular, or a senseless decision. Regimes are only accountable to the electorate while jostling for the votes to legitimise their usurpation of power. Once legitimised, they revert to the top-down approach of the bully lording it over the people. President Muhammadu Buhari’s government is […]

It is basically futile getting a Nigerian government to reverse an unpopular, or a senseless decision. Regimes are only accountable to the electorate while jostling for the votes to legitimise their usurpation of power. Once legitimised, they revert to the top-down approach of the bully lording it over the people. President Muhammadu Buhari’s government is no different. Emergent governments often assume that the people have surrendered their thinking and reasoning faculties to the elected and selected rulers.

Nobody considered the effects of beefing with members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), locking down public universities for eight months. Indeed even after the truce, government demonstrated its desire to keep it going by paying half salaries. Members of the ruling clique are either shareholders of private universities or they are waiting for their licence to start one.

This is how to explain – the new financial authority announced by Godwin Emefiele with the full sanction of President Muhammadu Buhari. Even for its rubber-stamp authority, the National Assembly was not informed about the policy.  When Zainab Ahmed, Buhari’s finance minister, protested, she was told that CBN owed her no consultation proviso. It is like turning someone’s backyard into a cemetery without consultation. Regimes usually find beautiful reasons to explain their actions without clarifying anything.

In today’s world, they have social media trolls and regime apologists who heckle everyone that tries to make government accountable to the needs of the people.

N8bn digital transaction value recorded by eNaira in one year – CBN

Census questionnaire won’t ask for religion, ethnicity – NPC

It is evident to anyone with a little sense that this fiscal policy is not in anyone’s best interest.

Seventy per cent of Nigerians live in the rural areas with no banking system to serve them. Some areas with bank structures have been locked down due to the high level of insecurity. Customers have to travel hundreds of kilometres to access banks. Under this regime, they would have to make dangerous and unnecessary journeys to withdraw money that would then be spent on transportation due to the high cost of petrol.

Those talking about the availability of POS outlets forget that they only work on effective telecommunication signals. We are talking of a nation where overwhelmed governments have sometimes forced GSM operators to shut down entire networks for security reasons. At any rate, what percentage of Nigerians is literate enough to own and effectively operate bank accounts?

It is inconsiderate to impose a fiscal austerity regime on the people close to the Yuletide and election season when every family needs money. This is the season when parents and guardians transport their wards to and back from school with spending money and new supplies. Some families have so many children that the limit they are allowed to withdraw in a week would keep their kids out of school for months. These are the people stretched beyond their limits with insecurity that they only make journeys where it becomes absolutely necessary.

At each turn of half-baked policies, the Buhari regime exhumes legal loopholes to explain their Rehoboam complex on the nation. The excuse that Nigeria is required to change its currency every 20 years is bunkum. What is obvious is how the Buhari family benefits when the elder brother of the president’s wife heads the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Plc., the agency that prints our banknotes and electoral materials.

The excuse that redenominating the naira at this time would curtail the level of kidnapping in the country is the most laughable excuse given to impose a misanthropic policy. Those who run the kidnap racket have since upgraded their ransom regime to make life even more unbearable for their victims. They now demand cash either in foreign denominations or specific new naira notes.

Nobody expects Buhari and his cronies to feel the pinch of insecurity while in relative security. Current and potential victims now have to go above and beyond to secure the safe release of their relatives by circumventing government policy. This is double jeopardy and an extension of the corruption regime. To these bloodhounds, a redenominated naira changes nothing!

The symbiotic class relationship between bank owners and powerful individuals means that the upper class does not go to the bank; the bullion vans go to their homes. A similar excuse was used to impose the BVN registration, the linking of BVN to SIM cards and the issuance of national identity cards under this regime. Yet, nothing has changed in Nigeria today.

Another jejune reasoning is that the policy would mop up the billions outside fiscal capture; money acquired illegitimately that should return to banks this close to a change of guards in Aso Rock and elsewhere. The belief that these hoarders would be forced to recirculate their loot is laughable.

To support its misanthropy, state-sponsored clips of raw cash emerged evidently dug out from septic tanks, private vaults or tree trunks. These clips have been widely shared on social media but nobody has been arrested or charged for hoarding unearned cash. In one such clip, the stash is wrapped in the logo of banks long extinct. In another, dampness and insects had eaten deep into watermarks of the money. Nobody explained where these clips surfaced and from reasonable conjectures, they could have come from the CBN vaults.

Younger Nigerians would find these clips convincing as their reactions reveal. They were probably too young to witness the General Sani Abacha era when exclusive footage of a phantom coup was being shown on big screens to a special class of Nigerians at the presidential villa. They probably have forgotten how exclusive views were organised to convince Nigerians that a dying Umaru Musa Yar’adua was in excellent health. Illegitimate governments resort to propaganda to explain away their bad actions to curry favour.

The American currency is the most abused anywhere but it has remained basically unchanged. Anyone from drug barons to mafia rings and human traffickers uses it for their illicit business. There were scare articles planted on social and mainstream media saying America would reject money from Nigeria! This is not only false but shameful.

In our sub-region, the CFA has been in circulation since the late 1940s. But for the redenomination of the Cedi, Ghana has had the same currency for much of its 63 years as a nation.

With the price of petroleum products hitting the roofs and government employing scare tactics in an attempt to bring it down, the deadline for the exchange of notes and the cap on how much could be withdrawn at banks and points of sales could only lead to chaos for rural dwellers who are still forced to transact businesses in cash. Finding banks to exchange old notes and withdraw new ones would expose them to a new level of insecurity.

Buhari could have given ample time for people to exchange the old currencies. One way of doing that is to issue instructions to commercial banks not to pay out money in old notes but to keep accepting them within a period of at least a year. That is the universal best practice; not the Indian example in which many died on the queue trying to source money for their own survival.