Some bank customers have decried scarcity of the redesigned N1,000, N500 and N200 notes in Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) and Other Financial Institutions (OFIs).
This is coming barely nine days to the Jan. 31 deadline to stop the use of the old notes of the redesigned denominations as legal tender.
The customers, who spoke to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Abuja, complained that banks kept supplying their customers with the old notes, which would soon cease to be legal tender.
According to Ibrahim Abbas, a Civil Servant, the banks have no reason to load their Automated Teller Marchines (ATMs) with the old notes after customers have deposited them in their accounts as advised by authorities.
“They say that they are redesigning some denominations of the Naira, and that Nigerians should take their old notes to the banks and start getting the redesigned ones.
“But what we still get from the ATMs, and even from the bank counters are the old notes. This is not right,” he said.
Mr Suleman Aliu, another bank customer said that the delay in flooding the banks with the new Naira notes close to the deadline meant that some people would lose some of their money.
“If the deadline is Jan. 31, which is nine days from today, and the banks are still supplying the old notes, it means they want some people to lose their money, ” he said
A Point of Sale (PoS) operator, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) needed to do better in its supply of the new notes.
“CBN is telling us that there are enough of the redesigned notes in vaults of the DMBs, but the banks are saying that they do not have enough supply of the notes. Something is not adding up,” he said.
NAN recalls that the CBN announced plans to redesign certain denominations of the currency in Oct., 2022, fixing Jan. 31 as deadline for the circulation of the old notes.