The release of the new naira notes, which entered official circulation on Thursday, was met with mixed reactions. In the banking halls of Nigeria’s biggest cities, many customers asked for the new bills, while a small number of others didn’t care about them.
The newly redesigned N1,000, N500, and N200 notes finally became legal tender on December 15, 2022, more than three weeks after President Major General Muhammadu Buhari (ret.) unveiled them at the biweekly Federal Executive Council meeting.
The N200, N500, and N1,000 notes will be redesigned, and the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, said on October 26 that the old denominations won’t be accepted as legal money after January 31, 2022.
Emefiele stressed that the local currency needed to be changed in order to fix Nigeria’s problems with inflation, currency fraud, insecurity, and other problems.
He also said that the new currency was meant to cut down on the amount of money in circulation and the amount of money paid as ransom to terrorists and kidnappers.
When our reporters went to banks in several cities across the country on Thursday, especially in Lagos and Abuja, they found that some branches had already run out of the small number of new bills sent to them by their headquarters as early as noon.
More research showed that some bank branches still didn’t have their new notes, and other bank employees told our reporters that the new notes were still expected.
When our correspondents visited the bank offices in Lagos, some of the locations had run out of their new note allocations. People who worked at some of the centers that still had new notes told ObasanjoNews24 that their amounts were very small.
On condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the situation, an Access Bank Plc representative at the Ojodu branch in Lagos said, “Each cashier was given N100,000 of the new N1,000 bill for onward disbursements to customers seeking over-the-counter payments. The additional N500 and N200 denominations are still unavailable. The current supply of the new notes is insufficient.
Also, our reporter saw that the ATMs at the bank branch were only giving out old naira bills.
While cashiers were dispensing more old naira notes at the center, customers could be seen depositing the old money over the counter.
But it was sometimes seen that when cashiers processed OTC payments, they mixed a few new naira bills in with some older ones.
In the meantime, some customers didn’t want to use the new bills in some of the banks our reporters went to because they had heard that some local stores wouldn’t accept them as legal money.
As a result, a few bank clients declined to accept the new notes for over-the-counter transactions.
One of our reporters found out about the problem when a bank teller in Ogba, Lagos, told him, “Some customers have been rejecting the new naira notes whenever we give them.” They said the new notes would not be collected from them in the market, and they prefer the old notes.
A bank clerk informed a customer who was requesting the new notes that she had used up all of her allotment.
But when the customer insisted on getting his money in the new bills, the cashier went to ask a coworker for some.
The cashier explained, “You are excited to obtain the new notes, but many of the clients I served today refused to take them from me.”
Lagos banks
Only one of the 10 bank offices in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, accepted payments from customers using the new notes. One of our reporters went to several ATMs in the FCT, but only one of them gave out the new naira bills.
Obasanjonews24 went to the Guaranty Trust Bank, the First Bank Plc, the Zenith Bank Plc, the Taj Bank, and the Access Bank Plc, all of which are in the Central Business District. They also went to the Jabi Garage.
No bank tellers were seen putting new bills on the counters for their customers.
However, the only ATM in the vicinity dispensing fresh N1,000 and N500 notes was that of Access Bank.
Every N10,000 that was withdrawn from the ATM produced N1,000, according to our correspondent.
Our correspondent saw that the ATM at the GTBank branch in Jabi was giving out obsolete N1,000 bills to users.
