Zulum to revoke banks’ land over refusal to dispense new naira notes

Babagana Zulum, the governor of BORNO State, has threatened to withdraw the property rights of any bank that deprives residents of the state of new naira notes.

After visiting 10 automated teller machines (ATMs) throughout the state on Friday and seeing they were empty of cash while long lines of people waited to withdraw money, Zulum issued the threat.

Only banks with legitimate justifications for not issuing the notes would be spared, according to the governor of the state.

On December 15, 2022, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) stated that the old N200, N500, and N1000 notes will no longer be accepted as legal cash as of January 31, 2023.

The apex bank extended the deadline till February 10 in response to requests and protests from Nigerians, and stated those who still had old notes could present them to the bank to swap for new ones or save them after the deadline.

Despite the deadline extension, the currency exchange has harmed people, homes, and companies in a variety of ways just three weeks before the 2023 general elections.

Many banks were only able to print one N1,000 at a time. Others distributed bundles of N5 bills.

While individuals waited in line for hours, expecting to receive some money, many ATMs were empty.

The situation has intensified as a result of point-of-sale (POS) operators charging up to ten times what they previously did for clients.

According to the ICIR, many people hurriedly took all of their old notes to the bank before the first deadline. However, it has proven impossible to get even a small portion of what they saved in new notes.

There have been stories of a guy who passed away while waiting in line and a pregnant woman who passed away at a hospital due to a lack of funding for medical care.

Nearly 220 million individuals in the country are frequently left in a desperate search for money due to network outages and complete shutdowns of internet banking services.

On his social media website on Saturday afternoon, Zulum posted a message in which he conveyed his anguish at the sight of hundreds of people waiting in line at a bank branch while just one out of ten ATMs were dispensing cash.

Only those with less privilege are lined up, as you can see. Nobody wealthy caught my eye here. There are reportedly a lot of people here as of 3am. Some people were unable to even eat. Commercial activity in the state are suffering as a result of the lack of the new naira note and even the older ones. People are in pain, Zulum lamented.

We recently paid out wages totaling over N5 billion, and the banks are cash-strapped, he continued. A few of the ATMs are broken. The CBN policy and withdrawal cap are both acceptable to us. Why can’t everyone have access to that N20,000, notwithstanding their claims that people could only withdraw N20,000?

He claimed to be in Gubio, a town with over 70,000 residents, but he claimed it was hard to find N100,000 within the local government.

The fact that neither the new nor the old notes were available for people to collect saddened the governor.

People were in need of money, he said, and “some wicked affluent people are coming to rural places to abuse poor people.” A ram worth N100,000 was being sold for N35,000 instead.

The governor requested that the CBN make replacement notes available at commercial banks so that citizens can access their money.