Although Friday’s (10th February) Council of State meeting convened and presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari proposed that the Central Bank of Nigeria should recirculate the old Naira notes to alleviate the cash scarcity in the country, Quest Times can authoritatively report that the old notes are already being destroyed.
“Unknown to members of the Council of State who were at yesterday’s meeting, the option of recirculating the old notes which some of the State Governors, Senate President, Speaker of the House and other former leaders suggested at the meeting to the President was no longer very viable because the old notes are already being dispensed with,” according to a source close to the CBN Governor.
Inside sources at the CBN confirmed that at least 75% of old Naira notes returned by Nigerians since the new notes have been released, have already been destroyed as at yesterday when the Council met.
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The source said “that had always been the plan since the President approved the Naira Redesign last October.”
As at last week the CBN said it has mopped up about 1.9Trillion old Naira notes. At the Council meeting yesterday (Friday) CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele told the leaders in a PowerPoint presentation that by the time of the meeting “about N2.1 Trillion has been recalled so far.”
A source close to the Governor added on condition of anonymity that “only about 25% of the old notes–about 2.1 Trn. are yet to be destroyed. So even if the CBN wants to start recirculating this it won’t go very far. But as at now, no one has even given an instruction to stop the destruction of the remaining 25% of the old notes recalled.”
It means, said a source, “even if the President now approves some of the suggestions Council of State members raised that the old notes be allowed to circulate alongside the new ones, it might be an impossible task since a significant portion of the old notes have been destroyed.”
The CBN and the Nigerian Minting and Security Printing company had made plans to destroy the recovered notes even before Friday’s meeting of the Council of State or before suggestions became rife that the old notes could be recirculated as a means of easing the cash scarcity in the country.
It would be recalled that Quest Times had exclusively reported that the Nigerian Minting Co. lacked the capacity to print enough new Naira notes to replace anything close to the amount of old notes people had paid in.
After the QT exclusive, some informed Nigerians, including the Governor of Kaduna State Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, were reported to have said the CBN and the MINT can only print N30OB new notes in a whole year, a confirmation of our earlier report.
Other sources put the figure at N350B in a year if the MINT is working at full, optimal capacity.
But the CBN Governor is yet to publicly level up with Nigerians that the MINT, of which he is the Board Chairman, does not have capacity to print even 1 Trillion Naira notes out of the over 2 Trillion already recovered from Nigerians, according to some Governors and Federal Ministers most of whom say no one informed them of the Naira Redesign plan.
At the Council of State meeting, the reasons Emefiele adduced for the scarcity of Naira were hoarding, tension and elevated Agitations, panic queues, panic mop-up of Naira notes by Politicians and incidences of economic opportunism.
A source said he did not own up to the fact that the MINT does not have the required capacity to print sufficient notes.