It was after 5pm Nigerian time – a period most commuters are already home or heading back from work. ‘Your money!’ the driver demanded. Few commercial drivers in Nigeria ever use the word “please”, or appear to spare any thought for such ‘awkward’ lexicon.
The lady whom the driver had addressed held a black polythene bag. She rummaged in it and pulled out four pieces of the fifty-naira denomination to pay her fare. Then a mild drama ensued. The taxi driver would have nothing to do with two of the notes and returned them to the lady. ‘Madam change dis money! I no dey collect am’.
The rest of the passengers became interested in what was going on. To be fair to the driver, the notes, of polymer material, were badly torn. One of them was sutured with sellotape – rather like several stitches on a bad cut.
Uncharacteristically calm and even meek for the time and season, the lady took back the notes and brought out another set of two in the same denomination as replacement. Again, the driver – multitasking between collecting his revenue and driving, rejected them. They were worse than the first – washed out and discoloured, even translucent.
The lady took back the notes and brought out several others, looking for which ones could be better and acceptable to the driver. As she did, she told a familiar but pathetic story. She had spent all the day in the bank and all she had got for her labour were 5,000 worth of these dilapidated notes the driver was rejecting.
Indeed, this was money paid to her over the counter in a bank in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, not perhaps, by some roadside artisan or tradesman in some backstreet suburb. Not some mangled notes fished out from the offering basket of some religious house or the spinning wheel of a gambling machine.
With the general knack for turning every situation into humour, one of the passengers in the vehicle joked that most of the woman’s misshapen fifty-naira notes were already thirty naira spent, i.e. less in value. And damn, those notes were in a really bad shape – but so was nearly everyone in the vehicle – emotionally and psychologically.
So has it been for weeks. The economy – both small and big businesses are gradually morphing into a lockdown phase. The CBN’s chokehold of a cash crunch is asphyxiating commerce and everything else. The insensitive ambivalence of both the President and his treasurer are, in addition to the fact that that they are well insulated from life on the streets, extremely callous.
The woman’s experience was not a one-off. I had left the International Conference Centre, Abuja on January 31st and made a short circuit to Area 8 – a layout that houses several branches of different commercial banks in the metropolis. I initially wanted to book a taxi back to the office and pay electronically.
But street wisdom dictated I go look for cash because I would need some the same day and indeed, for the rest of the week. So off I went, resolving as it were, to face the consequence of returning to the office much later than would be considered reasonable.
Rather than cash, what I met at the banks in Area 8 were milling crowds of sulking and grumbling citizens. Many had received salaries at the end of the month as most workers do, but were unable to get their hands on the cash even in the domicile branches of their bank accounts.
There were as many people in the bank halls as there were at the automated teller terminals. The only terminals that were free of swearing, cursing and emotionally vexed people, were those already tried and found to be out of service.
The newest preoccupation for the average Nigerian is hunting for naira notes. People are abandoning their daily hustles and routines to queue at bank premises and automated teller machines in the hope of getting some cash. In most cases, they end up in a forlorn quest, anguish and disappointment. From dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, the story is the same, day after day.
It’s regrettable to see commuters stranded at bus stops and begging taxi drivers to accept payment by electronic transfer; or worse still, to see people straggling through the length and breadth of markets begging traders – who may not have bank accounts, to accept payments without currency.
Many public sector workers are gradually beginning to abstain from work because they have no currency to pay their transport fares. Whole families are going hungry while the CBN through the banks are sitting on their money and means of sustenance.
The cashless economy the CBN seeks to impose by fiat is increasingly driving citizens towards desperation. Rather than relief, every day gets worse than the day before, and those who can, have resorted to buying money at ridiculous and worse than black market rates.
The sudden drive to move from a typewriter economy to a soft-touch, artificially intelligent and cashless one, has assumed the character of an undeclared war by the government against its people, majority of whom do not operate bank accounts.
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A report in one of Nigeria’s major dailies, The Guardian, claims: “Nigeria is one of the top three unbanked countries in the world, with 40 percent of its population without a bank account and out of the 59 million unbanked adults, 73 percent do not have the requisite documents to open a tier-three bank account”.
The reality is that most account holders simply operate salary accounts for the purpose of receiving their payments and making withdrawals. – Indicating quite clearly, that most of the economy is informal and that the informal sector is cash driven.
If the cashless policy is targeted at controlling inflation and streaming money back from informal and illegal channels into the banking system, the institutions the CBN is relying on to implement it – the commercial banks, have been unimaginably bankrupt in turning the scheme into a racket for exploiting and punishing Nigerians.
The CBN seems blissfully unaware – or so it seems, that not even the interim order to dispense a daily maximum of 20,000 over the counter to customers is being observed. Some banks give 10, 000 some 5,000 and many others none at all. Only the Islamic-oriented banks are complying with the directive, and are often constrained by unavailable funds.
Meanwhile, naira is sold for naira at rates that make more sense as criminal extortion than as business and profit. In many towns and cities, banks are closing their doors to customers for lacking their primary stock of trade – cash. It’s an economic blockade and every passing day puts it in the perspective of a malicious policy!
Some commercial banks in Abuja are programming their machines to dispense only 1000 or 2000 naira from their ATMs to third party customers at a N35 charge per withdrawal. A customer wanting to exhaust his daily limit would then have to several withdrawals with a N35 naira charge on each. Robbery has never been so easy – only this time, on the CBN’s watch.
If such heists could be perpetrated by commercial banks, what is to be expected of the informal operators? It’s a war situation! And as in war, all things are becoming fair – including greed and sheer abject cruelty. The situation in the FCT, is expectedly better than at the states and LGAs.
Just coming out of the yuletide season when most families are low on resources and when the pressures of school fees and other expenditures are piling high, the last thing anyone would expect is to have money in their bank accounts and be denied access to it.
And while Emefiele thinks he can control inflation by withholding money, perishable commodities are rotting in markets because buyers don’t have money. Most small holder farmers or retailers know next to nothing about the CBN’s electronic balderdash.
And talking about electronic transactions, there’s barely enough bandwidth on the telecom networks to deliver calls and data with fidelity, the same bandwidth on which the CBN thinks Nigerians should rely for cashless transactions. The banks already had more than enough “network” troubles before the CBN added this multiple dose!
Nearly every bank customer has a story or another about failed transactions. On an average day, the customer service desks of commercial banks are filled with customers complaining about failed electronic transactions either at the ATM, mobile apps, internet transfers, or PoS.
The CBN doesn’t want too much cash making the rounds – which is okay and understandable. But people want cash, need it like the oxygen of their daily hustles. And that, really, is the root of the problem.
The Supreme Court’s ruling of February 8 provided some relief but was sidestepped. Meanwhile, people have really been traumatized and put through the grind by a good policy poorly thought out, miscarried and executed in bad faith. The President’s broadcast brought almost nothing by way of relief, despite his admission of knowing the citizens are suffering.
Cashless economies are achieved by transition, not by executive fiat.
Julius writes from Utako