Officials of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) have distributed new Naira notes to remote communities in three local government areas of Kano State as poverty orchestrated by the scarcity of the Naira notes bites in other parts of Nigeria.
It was gathered that the CBN officials went to Kibiya, Rano, and Tundun Wada local governments to distribute the new Naira notes to residents of communities in the council areas.
The Deputy Director of the CBN, Muhammed Ali, who monitored the distribution of the notes said, “It is a remote area. We have been going to remote areas to make sure that people that have the old notes bring it out so that we can exchange it with the new one.
“It is an opportunity that the CBN has provided so that they can bring out their money so that we can exchange it for them. If they are not able to do that, the other option is to make sure they take their money to a bank for a deposit.”
He added that in order for them to benefit from exchanging their old naira notes for the new naira note, CBN has made provision for cash to be disbursed to rural places where there is no convenient road to the local government and no banking infrastructure.
The apex bank further promised that the new Naira distribution exercise will continue in all the 44 local government areas of the state.
However, SaharaReporters found out that CBN was not carrying out the cash swap exercise in many other remote communities in many other parts of the country, especially in the Southern parts of the country.
Recall that there have been a series of protests and attacks on commercial banks in some states including Ogun, Oyo, Ekiti, Edo, Delta and Lagos states over the Naira scarcity.
Whereas the CBN Deputy Director said that those in Kano state who could not bring out their old notes for the Naira swap exercise can go to commercial banks to deposit them, commercial banks in Awka, Anambra State capital told SaharaReporters last week that they no longer collected old Naira notes from customers, rather, customers could only return their old notes to the CBN directly.
With three days to the beginning of 2023 general elections, Nigerians are still lamenting the Naira and fuel scarcity with many businesses forced to shut down as the owners could no longer get cash to run the business.
