The over one-week excruciating pains, despair, and agony suffered by Nigerians in the hands of commercial banks and Point of Sale (PoS) agents, have been linked to the hoarding of the newly redesigned naira note by the commercial banks for pecuniary interests.
A joint monitoring and compliance team, comprising officials of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC), and Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), made this revelation during monitoring operations.
Before this revelation, commercial bank officials were heaping the blame for the scarcity of new notes on the insufficient disbursement by the apex bank to commercial banks.
Interestingly, the latest revelation by the monitoring and compliance team has unearthed the real enemy of the Nigerian people.
The new finding also validated the allegation that top bank officials in connivance with bank owners were exchanging these new naira notes to politicians who drive into the banks in the dark of the night to exchange the old notes for a mouth-watering interest rate.
The above allegation places the monetary gains to the banks to as high as 25 to 30 per cent of the amount exchanged, at the expense of poor masses who now keep vigil in Bank ATMs to be able to withdraw as little as N5,000 or even less.
The finding by the monitoring and compliance team reveals that officials of the commercial banks now use ATMs to warehouse these new naira notes for the politicians.
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Trending video on social media also revealed that bank managers now load new naira notes in ATMs, with its wrap intact to prevent the machine from dispensing the notes.
This perhaps explains the reason why only one out of five or 10 machines will be dispensing cash to an army of customers, while the rest will not dispense.
Giving credence to the above allegations, the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission, apprehended the First City Monument Bank Manager in Osogbo, the Osun State capital.
The spokesperson of the ICPC, Azuka Ogugua, in a statement on Friday, confirmed the arrest.
Ogugua said, the ICPC compliance team in Osogbo discovered an FCMB branch where some ATMs were loaded with cash, but its wrappers were not removed, thus preventing it from being dispensed.
The spokesperson, however, said, that the team directed that the wrappers are removed and the cash reloaded to enable the machines to dispense the money to customers.
In a related development, the anti-graft Commission, apprehended another official of one of the commercial banks in Abuja, for alleged sabotage.
The bank official, who is the Branch Service Head of Stanbic IBTC Bank, Deidei Branch, Abuja, was taken into custody for her deliberate refusal to load cash into the branch’s Automated Teller Machines (ATM) even when the cash was available, and people were queuing at the ATMs.
The ICPC compliance team, however, compelled the bank to load the ATMs with the new naira notes and ensure they were all dispensing before apprehending the culprit.
Addressing newsmen during a monitoring exercise in Bauchi State, the Head of the Monitoring and Compliance Team and Deputy Director of Operations CBN, Ms. Elizabeth Kwaghe said, her team visited some commercial banks in Bauchi to monitor transactions.
Scolding a Manager of United Bank for Africa (UBA), in the Bauchi metropolis, Ms. Kwaghe, queried, but you still have a balance of N91m? And people are out there looking for money and you are loading only one machine.
She said, “We looked at the allocation given to the banks, we traced it through their books, how much was loaded in the ATM, and how much they gave out to their agents. We looked at the record of how much each ATM carries, then we looked at the total amount withdrawn by individuals.
“So far so good, we can trace most of the money, in some of the banks, we have seen over 80 to 90 percent of the money disbursed to them, we queried them for not giving the money out to their agents. They are supposed to give this money to their registered agents”.
The monitoring team also, discovered that they are using old Naira notes to hide the new notes on their shelves.
Regrettably, this spreading of suffering and pain through hoarding of the new notes by commercial banks has pushed citizens to the extreme and they are now reacting with uncontrolled restiveness and looting of bank ATMs, as well as the destruction of property.
The recent looting of the Automated Teller Machines (ATM) of the WEMA Bank branch in Agodi, Ibadan, and the destruction of properties, as well as the bank building, is a case in point.
But poised to minimise the suffering occasioned by commercial banks’ deliberate hoarding of new naira notes for pecuniary interests, as well as prevent the rising restiveness against banks by despair and agonizing youths, Borno State Government has threatened to revoke the land title of any commercial banks found culpable in the state.
To this end, the state Governor, Prof Babagana Zulum, directed commercial banks to dispense new naira notes via Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) and banking halls.
ThisNigeria gathered that Zulum gave the warning after visiting branches of banks in Maiduguri, the state capital, to assess problems being faced by residents trying to access new naira notes.
“Any bank in Borno State that is not willing to ensure their ATMs are fully dispensing new naira notes cash to ease the suffering of our people, we will withdraw their land title immediately. We will only spare Banks with genuine constraints that are verifiable” Zulum said.
Zulum expressed displeasure over the queue at a bank branch, with only one out of 10 ATMs dispensing cash.
