The Senate and the House of Representatives, the two branches of the National Assembly, yesterday requested that the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, extend the deadline for the use of old naira notes beyond the goal date of January 31.
While the Senate asked that the deadline be extended to July 31, the lower chamber said it should be extended to June.
But the governor of the CBN, Godwin Emefiele, said yesterday that the January 31 deadline remained sacrosanct.
The Senate at plenary yesterday also urged the CBN to open an exchange window where people without bank accounts could deposit their old notes.
The resolution of the Senate was a sequel to a motion by Senator Sadiq Umar, APC, Kwara North, who demanded the extension to July 31, said he was worried by the insistence of the apex bank that there would be no extension.
Recall that CBN had on October last year, said the old naira notes would seize to be legal tender as of January 31, but the Senate in December passed a resolution urging the apex bank to extend the deadline to June 30.
Moving the motion, Umar recalled that the Senate in its resolution on Dec. 28, 2022, urged the CBN to extend the use of the old notes from Jan. 31 to June 30, but noted, however, that the apex bank had insisted on terminating the use of the old naira notes by end of January.
Umar, who lamented that there weren’t enough new naira notes in circulation, moved that the deadline be extended to July 31.
He said: “Experiences around the world have shown that such abrupt decisions, if not controlled, usually created chaos. The Senate should extend the use of the old notes to July 31.”
In their contributions, most senators overwhelmingly threw their weight behind the extension, citing scarcity of the new notes, both in the banks and at the various Automated Teller Machine points across the country.