By Pascal Oparada
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has blamed banks for the widespread dirty notes that are in circulation.
CBN’s Director of Communication, Isaac Okoroafor, told TheNiche that the banks were keeping the dirty notes in circulation because they don’t want to incur the administrative cost of paying for their sorting.
Okoroafor was reacting to a story published by TheNiche: Mutilated Naira notes sully Nigeria’s image.
“We never asked the banks to keep unfit notes in circulation. Indeed, we condemn it. We have urged the banks to bring them back to us so that we could collect them, destroy them and reissue them,” he told our correspondent through a text message.
He, however, said that the banks did not want to incur the little cost of sorting the cash.
“We have even gone to the extent of cutting down the cost of sorting one box of currency from N12,000 to N10, 000 since January 2018, yet the banks prefer to recirculate the old unfit notes instead of bringing them to us.
“We have devised a short-term solution of meeting market associations and supplying them lower denomination notes just to ease the difficulties encountered by Nigerians while we find a permanent solution to the problem,” Okoroafor said.
Nigerians have been putting up with such mutilated notes, especially N50, N100 and N200, and this adversely affects the country’s image because a country’s currency is a symbol of its pride.
If the preponderance of a country’s currency notes is dirty, it conveys the image of poverty, stench, and illiteracy about the country.