NEW NAIRA NOTES: Buhari-Emefiele's Policy Wild Goose Chase
Daily Rendezvous Culled from VENTURES By Oluwatosin Ogunjuyigbe - New Naira Notes off to a Sloppy Start - it's a Economic Policy Misadventures When you log on to the homepage of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), a timer stares back at you, counting down to January 31st, when the current series of N200, N500, and N1000 notes will become invalid in Nigeria. But as we inch closer to that deadline, there’s growing uncertainty around its realism. Let’s start from the beginning. In late October, when Nigeria announced that it would redesign these notes, it sparked a frenzy of mixed reactions, most of which were not optimistic. But the central bank cited several reasons for making this move. Primarily, it believed there were unhealthily large volumes of cash stashed outside banks, most of which were illegally acquired. According to Godwin Emefiele, the CBN governor, the apex bank had lost track of N2.7 trillion of the N3.2 trillion notes in circulation. So it planned t...