Godwin Emefiele, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, has ruled out the prospect of rolling back the cashless policy as it is now being implemented.
After updating President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday in Daura, Katsina State, on developments in the CBN and the Nigerian economy, he discussed the subject while answering questions from State House reporters.
Emefiele also revealed that about N1 trillion of the over N2.7 trillion that was floating around outside of the banking sector had been collected by the CBN and commercial banks.
The new naira notes, according to him, have arrived at the banks and are being distributed to their branches all over the country.
Emefiele said every village in Nigeria had access to financial services thus, they won’t be negatively impacted with the policy.
On the mopping up of naira notes outside of the banks he said “at the CBN, we have taken back more than N500bn worth of naira notes and the commercial banks have also done about N500bn.”
He said Nigeria had sufficient payment system infrastructure to support a full cashless economy which began in 2012.
“It’s important for me to say that the policy started in 2012, but about three or four times, we had to step down the policy because we felt we had to deepen the payment system infrastructure in Nigeria. Between 2012 and 2022, it is about ten years, we believe that a lot of electronic channels have been put in place that will aid people in conducting financial transactions in Nigeria” he said.
“We hear people complaining about the people in rural areas. While I was coming to Daura, I saw a kiosk of a super-agent. We have 1.4 million super agents across the country, in all local governments and all villages in this country.”
