By Titus Oise, Benin
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) yesterday took the campaign on the availability and admissibility of the new naira notes to Edo markets where it urged the people to replace their old notes with the new ones, told them to be accepting the new notes as there is no plan to shift the January 31 deadline for the old ones to be out of circulation.
Speaking at a sensitisation workshop at the popular Oba Market in Benin City, the Assistant Director and Acting Branch Controller, Benin Branch of the CBN, Michael Mgbeze also said that the Apex bank have sufficiently provided the new notes to banks assuring that from this weekend, all ATMs would no longer dispense the old notes.
He urged the people to adopt other alternatives of transacting business like the e-naira and others saying “We want people to be aware of the new notes and we also introduced the e-naira and we are doing onboarding for those that are not yet in the digital currency. The essence of the exercise is for people to use other channels of transaction like the internet banking, banking app, the USSD, Pos. there are always many alternatives channels for payment but because we are used to naira, we want to us cash at all times. The message is that people should try and shift their base and use alternative channels for business transactions”
Also speaking the State Director, National Orientation Agency (NOA), Austin Odile urged the people to own up to the fact that three denominations of our national currency have been redesigned and have become legal tender and one of the greatest challenge facing this new design seems to coming from persons in the political space. This is an election year and some of these persons feel that this redesign is targeted at them but whatever they meant by that I cannot fathom, the CBN governor, has come out to say it is not targeted at anybody and the CBN is only performing its statutory role as is found in the establishing Act. The last time this was done is over 13 years ago which means it is overdue.”
