JUST a few days into the Christmas and New Year celebrations, Nigerians are once again grappling with scarcity of naira notes, despite assurance by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on the availability of the local currency notes.
Reminiscent of the cash crunch of December last year and the first quarter of this year, due to the implementation of the botched naira redesign policy under the embattled Godwin Emefiele as CBN governor, the current scarcity being experienced across the country has started to bite hard on Nigerians.
Earlier in the week, deposit money banks’ Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) in many parts of the country were either not dispensing cash or witnessed long queues where they did, with some of the banks pegging maximum withdrawal limits from N20,000 to N50,000.
At the same time, transaction charges at Point-of-Sale (PoS) operators doubled due to the scarcity, rising as high as 100 per cent in some places from N200 per N5,000, as against the former N100 charge.
But CBN has blamed panic withdrawals of large volumes of cash from its various CBN branches by deposit money banks for the situation, insisting that there was no scarcity of naira, as the economy has an adequate supply of the currency.
