The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) says it has discovered N4 million of new naira notes hoarded in some commercial banks in Ogun State.
The deputy director, banking supervision department, CBN Lagos, Kayode Makinde, said this on Tuesday while monitoring the distribution of the new naira notes.
The CBN senior staffer who was obviously angry accused commercial banks of sabotaging the efforts of the CBN to make the new naira notes available.
the commercial banks sabotaging the efforts of the CBN in making the new naira notes available.
Mr Makinde said this is the third week of the monitoring exercise in the state in an effort of the CBN to ensure compliance with its directives on the issuance of new notes.
It will be recalled that some politicians have accused the Governor of the CBN, Godwin Emefiele, of trying to sabotage the circulation of the new notes for political reasons.
The political bigwigs believed that the CBN Governor was hoarding the new notes to scuttle the general elections.
Mr Makinde, however, told the public to blame the commercial banks over the scarcity of the new notes, saying the CBN has done its part.
“This is the third week of ensuring strict implementation of our directive as regards the issuance of new notes. We have banks, agents and super agents circulate new notes in the economy. The experience has been mixed, we saw some trying to hoard new notes, we compelled them to upload into ATM terminals, and others had poor cash management.
“From our experience, CBN should not be blamed but commercial banks for scarcity. We caught some of them, with new notes in their vault, and we compelled them to upload them to their machines. We told them that instead of trying to ration, upload the ones they have and contact your central cash Management unit which has direct access to CBN for more.
“We came across instances of sabotage on the part of operators, we will take the case up and they will be dealt with appropriately.
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” We have given a directive that they shouldn’t pay out new notes via the counter but other notes, some of them did that and ran out of cash. Some of the branches deployed resourceful cash management skills and they never ran out of cash while others experience cash run out and are still waiting for their source.
“We came across one of them that couldn’t account for almost four million naira of new notes and appropriate sanction will be placed on them.”
Mr Makinde further said two teams were dispatched to cover two senatorial districts on each day of the monitoring exercise.
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