Emefiele should consider resigning over hardship caused by naira redesign policy –Anidi, entrepreneur

Managing Director of EU Consults and Operations Director, GOTE Group of Companies, Olorogun Oscar Anidi, speaks on the new naira redesign and cashless policy introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) that has caused scarcity of naira notes, and the hardship faced by business entrepreneurs, in this interview with Deborah Onyofufeke.

The cashless policy has been with us for a while and the situation seems to be biting harder, what are your views on the policy?

They said it’s a naira redesign and then they called it a naira swap, then they said it’s cashless. First of all, we didn’t redesign the naira at all, we just changed the colour. Every country globally, whether in Africa or the western and eastern nations that have redesigned their currencies in the last 10 to 15 years has all gone for smaller sizes, they’ve all gone for more durable material. In Nigeria, the quality of the money we have now is even worse than the quality of the money we had before. Again, the naira is supposed to last for one year in circulation before it gets taken out, but the process was done in a hurry. Similarly, if you say it’s a naira swap, what that means is that it is an exchange. I give you the old naira and you give me the new naira back. If so, then why all these restrictions? Why do we have all these restrictions that say you give us your money, and you get money from the ATM? Bearing in mind that you gave us 90 days to do all that whereas the new naira didn’t start coming out until 30 days before the deadline. Are you saying 100 million Nigerians should all go to ATMs to withdraw cash, does that make sense?

Do you think the cashless policy was a mechanism used by the CBN to help see to a free and fair election by curbing vote buying?

Curb vote buying? Does that make sense? Where does it say in the CBN Act that CBN is in charge of monitoring elections? Is it their job? The CBN’s job is currency, economy, and monetary policies, right? It’s not the election, they have no business in elections apart from Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). So, what has the CBN got to do with monitoring elections? We have the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), we have the police, so we have organisations that can do that. You say it’s targeted at curbing vote buying, let’s talk about it now, you starved Nigerians of cash.

Are you saying that Nigeria cannot function as a cashless society, because most nations do?

We are not saying Nigeria cannot function cashless, but there’s a process. Let us not use America or UK or Sweden or Canada, Sweden is one of the countries that are about 90 per cent cashless alright so the UK is about 70 per cent cashless, let’s not even use them. Let us use Kenya, for example, Kenya has been cashless for over 10 years, not two years ago, not five years ago, but over 10 years, when the mobile phone came into play, they have a network called Safaricom. At least 99 per cent of Kenyans use Safaricom and the moment you get a Safaricom SIM, you have what they call EMPESA, which is mobile money. Before this policy came into being, there was a lot of education. The authority concerned educated the people by going to the rural areas, supermarkets, and stores, and the traders who sell potatoes were encouraged to get their mobile phones. So, they have educated them on how to use it. This is a country of slightly over 40 million people, but their system works because they practiced cashless before they withdrew the money from the system. We did not hear about going to withdraw money from the system. I have been there about 10 times in the last three years and I’ve not spent the shillings myself, right from the plane my phone does all the transactions, including hotel bills and everything other things I want to do there. Whereas in Nigeria, I was going to the airport the other day, I got to the toll gate and they requested cash, I had no cash, and they don’t have a PoS machine and they don’t take transfers.

So, what happened was a long queue which caused a commotion. So, what we’re experiencing here in Nigeria is that system was not equipped to handle the cashless situation. They’re just forcing us into something that’s going to cause a lot of problems for the average man whose petty trade is N50, N100, or N200. Most of them don’t even have accounts, so, this is the problem. Besides, they were not educated and there were no awareness campaigns. We don’t have the structure in place, and you are forcing us into a cashless policy scenario.

You talked about educating the people and how the CBN did not take the right steps before delving into this policy. What steps should the apex bank have taken?

They should have brought in stakeholders from commercial banks, microfinance banks, and other credit schemes to find out if they were ready to implement the cashless policy. I don’t think they were brought in because if did the banks would have told CBN they were not ready. I’m sure they would have done that because their servers needed to be upgraded to handle the heavy traffics. I don’t think CBN brought them in- it was a one-man show, and it was a dictatorship kind of implementation. The Minister of Finance did not even know about this naira redesign policy and that was how bad it was. It was a one-man show because if he had brought in the stakeholders, the banks, the credit unions, fintech, and network providers to ask critical questions, these whole problems would not have arisen.

What is the way forward?
The whole situation is just unfair and that’s all. The Supreme Court has said both the old and new naira notes are used side by side until Dec 31, 2023, and I think slowly they can out the old notes. Not this fire brigade approach that has caused us this hardship.

There are those calling for the resignation of the CBN gov, Godwin Emefiele over this policy failure, do you agree with them?

I think that is the most honourable thing to do. Liz Truss, the immediate-past Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who lasted for 40 days, made two mistakes which the IMF and the Bank of England told her and she resigned. That is an even greater position than the CBN governor, who has made mistakes upon mistakes and is still in office. The e-Naira did not work, and nobody questioned it, you went ahead to redesign the naira with billions of naira, why waste billions of naira to print new money that is hardly in circulation?