This naira notes comedy would be amusing if it were not an offence under Section 21(4) of the Central Bank Act 2007, punishable with an imprisonment term of not less than six months, or a fine not less than N50,000 or both.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has put out notice that peddling and distribution of naira currency notes is unlawful, but it appears the noise at these social gatherings has drowned out the advice.
It is indeed ironic that while fresh currency notes, which are in the custody of the CBN and the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Company and passed through the commercial banks are usually unavailable to legitimate account holders at the banks, they are mysteriously available, exclusively, it appears, to private petty traders with enough stock and guts to re-sell them to citizens in need of clean notes.
This is a sad commentary on the duplicity of the banking system in fostering the supply of clean notes to hawkers while neglecting customers.
The CBN should also erase the hint of hypocrisy on this matter by clamping down on this illegality. The supply route of the freshly-minted cash begins in the banks and no institution is better placed than the same CBN to search out the culprit banks for sanctions.
CBN should go further to circulate clean currency notes to the Nigerian people and stop its dirty notes policy that has apparently goaded the elite in urban Nigeria into scrambling for freshly-minted notes in the hands of hawkers, in obvious infringement of the law.
Source: Guardian
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