By Adewale Adeoye
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) says you can’t take more than N20,000 out of your own money in one day. Corporate groups that want to buy a fridge urgently won’t be able to do so. They need to wait for days.
They claim they want every Nigerian to be Internet compliant when more than half of Nigerians have no access to the Internet and less than 30 per cent of Nigerians have bank accounts in the first place. The CBN wants a child of three weeks to start running on his feet. They want to kill the child.
The banks are keeping our money, trading with our money, making a profit but are telling us there is a limit to which we can use the money we have laboured for.
You can’t spend more than N20,000 but the banks can receive billions of naira in one day.
The Banks are an extension of the ruling class. When the political class is sick, the banking sector will also be ill.
CBN is saying children of a mother cannot feed on their mother’s breast more than once a week, yet CBN has made provision for neither akamu nor cow milk. They don’t care if the children cry until death comes.
They will suffocate the children, Nigerians, to death. Imagine, you are asked to make a deposit of N50,000 for an emergency operation in a hospital, while on the sick bed, you need to give N20,000 to someone to buy you medicine from the pharmacy and the person needs to transport himself in a taxi driven by someone without POS.
Even if you take your own car and you want to buy fuel on the way to save someone’s life, the petrol attendant says the network is bad, you get to the Chemist, the network is bad and you can’t transfer money or you transfer the money but the Pharmacist did not receive the alert. He then tells you, you can’t take the medicine.
This is not to talk of travelling a long distance and on the highway, your fuel got exhausted. The next petrol station has a faulty POS on a highway infested with kidnappers.
Now, how do we buy a cow of 150,000 from a Fulani man in the bush that has nothing to do with POS?
There is a spiritual dimension
How do you pay your tithe in your church and you wish to pay N50,000 on a Sunday?
How do you give funds to poor people in your Mosques or Churches who have come to you for urgent help? These poor folks need about N10,000 but they have no bank accounts.
Sometimes you even want to pay money in your Church or Mosque without showing your name, a privacy that is legitimate.
For traditional religion followers, how do you pay your Babalawo in the remotest villages who need N20,000 from you to make sacrifices?
How do you pay farmers in the villages and down the valleys who live on farms and have no need for banks?
CBN is forcing Nigerians to use banks but most Nigerians detest the banks that offer no benefit to them. They keep your money only to take COT. No matter what the CBN does, people won’t keep money in banks for many reasons: The banks are infested with crooks; online rogues have partners in the banks.
Through online transactions, Many Nigerians have lost funds to criminals working in banks and they never get their funds back.
Most Nigerians see the banks as high-risk vendors. They see the banks as collaborators in crime. Many Nigerians hate their banks.
Yet, interest on savings is about 1.5 per cent. It means it does not make any sense to save money in Nigerian banks.
Dividends on Treasury bills have collapsed from 20% 10 years ago to less than two per cent. It means in one year you can only make two per cent on investment but the COT deducted from your banks will almost eliminate the two per cent gain.
Nigeria is like a car whose engine has been destroyed by reckless drunk drivers. The irresponsible drivers are now looking for excuses. They are now asking passengers to sell pints of their blood to fix the car engine yet the mechanic expected to fix the engine is in a state of drunken stupor.
Corruption has eaten deep into the fabric of Nigeria. The country is empty. Operators of the system are confused. They don’t know what to do. They are employing voodoo options.
When you catch a thief in the market with stolen goods, it’s not unusual for the thief to resort to attacking everyone on sight. This policy of the CBN does not make sense.
The CBN is chasing shadows, leaving the substance.
SMSE will suffer with this policy. More people will use the banks but the banks and their Internet fraudsters will have free reign to rob and killing many Nigerians.
I hope what is happening in Lebanon won’t happen in Nigeria. The people in Beirut can’t receive their own money kept in banks. If they ask for 50,000, the banks will give them 5000.
They have resorted to physically robbing the banks or at gunpoint to retrieve their own money lodged in those banks which they refuse to give to them.
That the policy will check armed robbers is not true. The real robbers are those in those banks, in those political camps, stealing public funds in billions of naira. That it will stop kidnapping is also false. It only means victims of kidnapping must be prepared for more account owners to collect N20,000 in large numbers to be given to the kidnappers.
The heart of the elite has no place for the masses. They design policies without thinking of the poor.
There is a way out: Comrade Femi Falana, the iconic hero that has helped millions of poor people out of distress, should come to our aid. He should sue the banks and reverse this ugly, savage and tyrannical policy.
