By Pascal Oparada
Nothing launders a country’s image like its security personnel, international airports, and other entry points.
Next to them is the country’s legal tender, this time the Nigerian naira.
The mutilation of the 50, 100 and 200 notes adversely affects the country’s image, let alone the repulsion that greets you when handed some of the badly damaged notes.
There has been a myth created around the bad notes in order to keep them in circulation. The word on the street is that the government has said no one should reject them.
But some say it is a hoax because the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has issued a notice to the banks to start the immediate withdrawal of the bad notes. The banks appear recalcitrant.
Religious connotations?
It is alleged that the federal government had asked the CBN to keep the dirty notes, especially the hundred naira notes, in circulation until the ones without the Arabic inscription are phased out.
In 2014, the government of President Goodluck Jonathan launched a commemorative hundred naira notes to celebrate the centenary anniversary of the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates in 1914.
It is not uncommon to see crisp notes being sprayed on celebrants in parties and other social functions. There is a ban by the CBN on spraying notes at functions.
George Douglas, a banker with one of the new generation banks told TheNiche off camera that there are new notes in the vaults of the various banks but cannot be circulated due to the current directive by the CBN.
“The only people you will see spending the new notes are the bankers themselves because they have access to them,” Douglas said.
It is also alleged that the bankers trade off the new notes. According to Douglas, the monies you see at parties and functions are obtained from bankers or CBN staff who sell the notes to the highest bidder.
Another banker with another new generation banks said since the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari came, there have not been new naira notes circulated, especially the hundred naira notes.
He said although there are new notes, but they too small to go round.
Risk of contracting diseases
According to research, paper money can carry more germs than a household toilet. And bills are a hospitable environment for gross microbes. Viruses and bacteria can live on most surfaces for about 48 hours, but paper money can reportedly transport a live flu virus for up to 17 days.
Researchers from the Wright Patterson Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio, asked people standing in line at a grocery store checkout and at a high school concession stand to trade a $1 bill from their pocket for a new one. Then the doctors analyzed 68 of those old, worn bills.
Five of the bills contained bacteria that can cause an infection in perfectly healthy people, and 59 of them (that’s 87 percent) were contaminated with bacteria that could cause an infection in anyone with a compromised immune system, such as people with HIV or cancer.
Only four of the bills were relatively clean.
Three phone calls and SMS to CBN’s spokesman, Issac Okoroafor, did not elicit any response. When TheNiche first reached him and sought his reaction on the dirty notes in circulation, Okoroafor said he was at a function in Calabar and asked that the reporter call back in three hours. But he did not respond to subsequent phone calls.