I really don’t know any other trick left in CBN’s bag that hasn’t been used to cajole the rest of us into the nirvana of cashless life. But Nigerians love the hard ways or how would you describe hauling cash around, endangering lives and limbs when the price of prosthetics are at all-time high?
A good example? Don’t worry I have a bagful of that.
At the Lekki Toll (I hate that damned contraption) you could line up for years to pay cash or just zip through the electronic gate in seconds. The kicker? It’s cheaper; it’s faster; and free to install. But you find guys lined up day after day, wasting their precious little lives away inside the heat and getting their cars nicked, just to pay cash.
Sanusi pushed hard for the cashless revolution, got banks to throw in a lot of commitment but what do we have to show for it?
In fairness, the country has witnessed considerable success. Using cards abroad is now common place. Paying on the POS no longer looks scary but rumor still has it that more than N1 Trillion in hard cash is still hiding under someone’s mattress.
So here’s the thing – if we won’t do it easy, we will do it the hard way. Just change the Naira and everyone must come to the banks to change it. You have to deposit your money in a bank, any bank, and not get it back in cash again.
Sounds impossible? Soludo almost got away with it. Buhari did it in 1984 and the world didn’t end.
This is how to do it.
- Change the notes and give everyone a year swap
- You can only deposit the money into the bank and so you have a year to open an account, get your BVN and your debit cards
- At the end of the year, if you don’t change your dirty notes, your Naira loses 50% of it’s value and at the end of another year, it becomes zero, zilch, nothing.
Haven’t I talked about this before? Some things need repeating!
It’s a Sunday but with nothing important to do and rain doing stuff on the roof, I may as well apply my time to annoying cash hoarders.