Banks, customers decry unavailability of new naira notes

By Zion Rufus

As Nigerians express anxiety over the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN’s) 31 January, 2023, deadline for the phasing out of old 1, 000, 500 and 200 naira notes, Nigerian commercial banks have also revealed that the new notes are not fully available for circulation.

Addressing viral allegations that banks are still dispensing old naira notes through their Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), a senior staff of a reputable commercial bank in Nigeria, who did not want his name in print disclosed that despite CBN’s strict directive to all the banks to load their ATMs with the newly redesigned notes, scarcity still persists.

“We have heard about the proposed sanctions, and the supposed new notes handed to us. But I can tell you for a fact, we can’t give what we don’t have. The new notes we have, we disburse. When we run out of the new notes, and when customers come to the bank to deposit their old notes, we are powerless. We can’t give what we don’t have,” he revealed.

According to the insider, customers have also complained that transport workers in rural areas are rejecting the redesigned notes.

“So on one side we are faced with scarcity of the notes, on the other, the few notes we can disburse are being rejected,” he said.

A representative of another bank told MARKETING EDGE in confidence that the new notes in circulation are not enough.

“On average, a top bank dispenses 2 to 4 billion naira daily via ATM. But at this time, we only get to disburse an average of 600 to 800 million new naira notes,” he disclosed.

However, CBN, the apex regulatory bank claims that it has been “begging” commercial banks to take the new notes.

CBN Director of Legal Services, Kofo Salam-Alada, who made this disclosure at a sensitization programme in Lagos, revealed that CBN will penalize banks for failure to collect the new notes and also for failure to disburse them via their ATMs.

“We have these new naira notes in our vaults and we are waiting for banks to come and collect them. Part of what we are doing is that we have monitors going around banks. I have been to some ATMs this morning and I have logged reports, I have spoken to management of various banks,” he said.

CBN has maintained that there will be no extension of the deadline as the old naira notes will cease to be a legal tender from January 31, 2023.

Nigerians have also taken to social media to protest the deadline and continuous disbursement of old naira notes, to which CBN has declined to respond.

Here are some of the remarks below: