The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has arrested a bank’s operations manager in Abuja for hoarding N29m worth of new naira notes.

Nigeria’s apex bank, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), fixed February 10 as the deadline for swapping the old naira notes with the new ones. But there is a scarcity of banknotes, a development that led to the intervention of security agencies.

 

The EFCC, which is one of the agencies, said it arrested the unnamed bank staff in one of its operations.

“An Operations Manager of a leading Commercial bank in Abuja Central Area was on Monday, February 6, 2023, arrested by operatives of the Economic and Financial Commission, EFCC for refusing to load the Automated Teller Machines, ATMs, of the bank despite having N29 million of the redesigned Naira notes in the branch’s vaults,” the agency said in a Monday statement.

“Before he was whisked away for further questioning, the operatives ordered the loading of all the ATMs and the payment of the stipulated amount across the counter to the delight of the distraught customers who had spent hours in queues without getting the new notes.

“This discovery, which indicates sabotage of the government’s monetary policy by some banks, was made by the EFCC in continuation of the ongoing surveillance and visit to banks across the country to access their vaults and verify whether they were deliberately refusing to dispense the redesigned Naira notes. More than five bank branches were covered today by the operatives in Abuja. Similar exercises are ongoing in Zonal Commands across the country.”

 

However, the Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, has advised the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to review its naira swap policy to reverse its negative impact on Nigerians. 

Fashola, who made a live appearance on Channels Television’s The 2023 Verdict on Monday, was reacting to the outcry over the widespread scarcity of the N200, N500, and N1,000 banknotes since they were unveiled on November 23, 2022.

According to the CBN, the old versions of those denominations will no longer be legal tenders after February 10, 2023 as the apex bank targets hoarders of illicit funds in the buildup to the general elections.

The minister bemoaned the hardship brought on by the directive of the apex bank, saying it was imperative that public officeholders reviewed their policies when they had the opposite effect than desired.

“I empathise with those challenges but some of them are the result of policy and it is the responsibility of public servants, especially those responsible for those policies to look back and say, ‘Did we intend to cause this pain?’ 

“And if the policy is not working, perhaps you have to readjust and to also ask yourself whether you thought this through. As a public officer, before and now, I have had cause to reverse myself, when I saw that my policies were causing unintended results. 

“So, I have no responsibility on those two areas and therefore I cannot speak to the details of the facts that are available to the policymakers but the important thing is that those policies are not yet delivering the results and are delivering a lot of inconvenience for [people],” he said.