Welcome to our conversation about the current issues with the cashless naira, you know, the implementation by the C .B. N Central Bank of Nigeria government in Nigeria. You know, so far it’s catastrophic, we’ve seen banks being vandalized, a t m, machines being vandalized. I think there we saw a place where a man became naked in the bank.
Well, stating that, his wife was sick. He needed his money to pay for his wife’s healthcare. And then subsequently, we also saw a video of his children stating that they were attacking the bank manager somewhere in aba. I don’t know the particular bank. You know, they took away her tires, they molested her but you could see they were really angry. Patrick, is this how we should have managed this system? What could we have done differently?
Thank you very much for having me. , I won’t say that it’s a total failure. It’s not even really a failure. There is some level of, we have some levels of, successes.
Okay, the aim of this Naira cashless policy is really, a welcome eye there and, I mostly am also, we’re achieving what we want to achieve by having a cashless society, by carbon. Insecurity, and as well, corruption. We also have to go down with, the policy. But be data is made at it may, there are some, notes that need to be tighten tightened.
And we also mapped out all this earlier before, The policy came into place. But I will say that they didn’t do a very good job. They did, but the stakeholders, management, and mapping and auditing will still need to go back to that and, take a look at it. I will just say that this should be, I believe, an Agile project, which they implemented, and being an agile project.
And, also a Kaizen project. They are just moving it as the day comes by. So, the result, and the impact s are eye-opening right now. Yes. Yes. So, what I will say is that in mapping out the stakeholders. Stakeholders, who ought to find out who are the stakeholders who will be affected by this, cashless.
One, is unbanked. Two, then, when we say unbanked, population, they actually make up the numbers. Forget the big numbers that you get from in the urban centers. One, one big organization. Or one big guy somewhere in the modern, modern, cities. No, but when you have clusters of all these, all these.
Small, small businesses. Because they, they’re still unbanked, they’re, they’re still, they unbanked in rural areas and unbanked in urban areas. Yes. They’re still unbanked people in Lagos, in Abuja. In Port Harcourt. Yes. Because they need their cash. They need to touch their cash with their hands, and they need to be able to go to, the market very early.
I want to, you know, and I know I’m taking. One after the order. Mm. I want to really talk about this on banks. This on banks must be mapped out. We must have a proper audit. Mm. Take a monetary evaluation first to actually understand, yes, we’ve, started with this policy, but we can always make it work better.
How we need to get down to this. Let me use the market. And market. We also have market men, both in the rural and the urban areas. And for every one of us, we must have, there’s a supplier and that supplier for what to eat, what to consume daily, and their foodstuff. It comes from. If you don’t know, it doesn’t just manifest in the urban city or that supermarket.
You see there’s a supply chain. There’s a supply chain. So that’s why I want to talk about the supply side of it. This supply side of it comes from the villages, the farmers, boats, the small-scale farmers, and the big-time farmers. Well, let’s talk about small-scale farmers. The small-scale farmers are those rural, men and women who produce Tomato from Jos who produces potatoes etc?
Who comes out with all these, condiments that we use? The foodstuff. They, these are people that, want to touch their money. And I will not say that they can easily jump into using, technology for transactions. For them to really do their jobs, they can’t just jump into it.
There should be some level of change management, which is, where I’m also going to go through, I’m going to touch that, after analyzing this, so these people, we like to, they, they, they, culture has been that they touch their money. The exchange is you pay them, you come, you begin, you pay them their money, and you take the.
Way. So, now the government wants to change this policy such that you don’t just get this cash. I’ll do a transfer to you and then I’ll take your boosts and these people. It’s not just that easy for them to agree to this banking because most of them don’t even have a bank account.
Truly to receive your payments. So that’s the pressure, the real pressure that I am seeing in the city that is happening in the banks. And you are seeing the CBN coming with, first level 20,000 will be the cash that will be given to, their cost. Bank customer. , how truly will these 20,000 go down?
Did they analyze it? Did they find out these market women that go to villages to buy the food stock, whether per day, a transaction that they do is 20,000? If it is not 20,000, then the pressure will be on this. Women to actually buy money. It’s bringing me to the other side of this place because they’ll have to continue with their business.
And con continuation of this business means that they’ll go to the bank really to get 20,000. Yes. That’s what is approved. Because some, even some banks we’ve had is 5,000. That is the daily limit. Let’s just take what they have as Physical cash. Okay. 20,000. Okay. , this person, the volume of his or her market is about 30,000, 40,000, or even hundred or 200,000 per day.
So how will this person make up for the shop floor? That means, he or she has to buy money and buy this money, from the research. 10,000 is not anything less than 10%. So am I even charging 30% Yes? To sell money to you? So 10% of 10,000 is 1000.
It has gotten to 20%. 2000 in some cases where the pressure is too much. Yes. And that’s when the seed, because there’s a serious scarcity of this physical cash, because of what is being released. , you know, and if this continues, what will happen? And that means they’ll not be able to buy this, they’ll not be able to go for this, their business.
So, I will appreciate if, the government will take a look at, quickly take a look at the limits. Those that don’t have banks, banks, banks on banking in banks, the rural areas, areas. And then also make sure that some sort of, the provision will be made and maybe to increase the 20,000 to something that will be, better.
Make sure that, these, people that are, that is unbanked will be banked, so that they can come. I have some level of, accounts where transactions can happen. And also, you know, I said stakeholder identification and management. I, the issue before this, project up to before, this project coming into place, maybe they did not, or they.
because I’m not part of them and I don’t know what they must have done. And I told you it is a success already. But a little needs to be done. Ensure there should be a continuous improvement on effort on it. That’s what I preach. So being that network has been a really, really big issue.
That’s another side of this, because the technology, the technology is not stable. People do transfers. It hangs in the. The resolution doesn’t happen immediately. Some have said it even takes more than 24 hours to resolve that transfer. So would you be standing in the market, you know, forever waiting for the transfer to hit the next person’s account?
Even, that happened to me. I went to the market. I, wanted to, have a feel of what, these people are going through. So I decided to, buy fish. From, those who, sell cartons of fish. So this time I bought half, I bought a half carton and, I didn’t have much cash.
But yes, the vendor has a bank account, which I didn’t trust her. And they took my money. I exchanged my number with this lady. Whenever, because I showed her, this is my, transfer. This has gone. She said, okay. She took my number to tell me whenever she receives it. Two days later I was driving past the place.
She told me, okay, I’ve not yet received it. Wow. This is 48 hours later. Yes. I’m here to receive the money. I’ve checked and checked. So I told her, okay, it’ll still drop. If it doesn’t drop, I will source for money.
So this is the typical, scenario so, we need to, do what I’m, what I want the stakeholders to do, CBN, the commercial banks, and all that to make sure that they engage with network providers.
If they’ve not done that before, they need to really, seriously engage with them. I thought they would’ve. A pilot because in every project there must be a pilot. And having that pilot would, should have been so that you learn some lessons from the pilots. I, what, what they would’ve done is now that I want to go cashless, the bank, a certain bank or the cbn or just get, the bankers, that is a day before you go live.
It’s okay. All of us. Let’s test. , being, on the platform at the same time. So let’s say a bank, GT bank, or whatever, all the staff do a transfer at the same time. They say nine o’clock. So if all of us engage ourselves on this platform and then get it done and, and see how, whether it is working, whether when, so, because what is happening now is that everybody, at every point in time, everybody’s the pressure.
Yes, everybody’s on this or trying to transform, and we don’t know if it has that capacity because you still keep seeing that the transfers fail. We did not transfer so many times a pilot to, no. Because if you did that, you would’ve. Ah, I think we need to really engage with the network providers and say, please, we intend to implement a cashless, economy.
And, you are part of the stakeholder. And is, we’ve identified you as, a major stakeholder, and having been identified as a major stakeholder, you need to really make sure that our network works very well. Because we need it. We seriously. Nigerians are really suffering because of transfers.
You can’t, in some cases, you can’t even, get through. The system will tell you that it’s not in place now and all that. And I just pray, you know, that people don’t even go into an emergency at such a time as this, because that would be, that would be catastrophic. There are already emergencies, you know?
No, like what I mean, health emergencies or so. because that would be really, really catastrophic. That is already, it is already happening. Airplane. And that’s why you saw the man from the intrude that you, you mentioned of a man that became naked in the banking. Psychologically he became very, very unstable because he couldn’t have access to his, cash.
So, a lot is going on. Every minute. There’s an emergency somewhere. Every minute, every hour somebody needs cash or needs to transfer. Nigeria has not come to the stage where they don’t see the money. You, you have drawn transfer and then you show them even. I show them the alerts because of the debit alerts, the debit alert.
They’ve already before this time, they also have front them people that have, used that, metal to pick their good and pick goods without, their money hitting their accounts. So they want to make sure that their accounts have the money arriving. That’s why even on the side, some of the market women say, I don’t have.
I don’t have an account just because even those that do have accounts, just because they don’t want scamming. You know you bought my goods, you scammed me, you moved the way. Okay. And all of that. So that brings us to the next level of, engagement and, that engagement that want to see. I want, I’m talking of orientation.
Getting National Orientation Agency involved, a national orientation agency, letting people like us also educate people, about, this policy that you intend to do before you even come out. But even if you’ve not done that, it’s not yet too late. You can do even get some, social media, and media influencers to, impact knowledge. Tell people about using, technologies and others to do the job. So that’s another thing. So the network is an issue and network providers need to be engaged. Beautiful. So we’ve identified that the stakeholder engagement wasn’t sufficient.
The project would’ve been piloted, you know, and then we talked about the technology adoption is low with the unbanked, so that’s why there is a lot of friction. So thank you so much for listening in. We’ll still come back, you know, on this topic. We just felt, you know, as a team at Ritetrac Consulting that we should throw a bit of light.
We hope someone somewhere is listening to it. Some of the interventions can still be applied, you know, getting the orientation agency, people down, social media, people using radio, you know, think of all the different segments. Of society, how, what do they listen to? Pass this information to them, teach and encourage them unbanked to, you know, become, you know, have something where people can transfer payment to you and, and stuff like that.
I must commend CBN for this policy. I must. The federal government of Nigeria this policy is beautiful is a lot, but it’s just the execution. There’s, there’s a lot of, continuous, so all they need to do is just to tighten all this and we’ll be there. So, we’ll keep talking. We’ll keep, getting, feedback.
Feedback, in the public sector and the private sector things that, how. The policy affects them, who,, engage with, stakeholders and then get back to them. You and this. Thank you very much. You’re welcome. Welcome. I Met Patrick, and I’m all Ojiugo. And on the last note, you know, let’s also do our lessons learned.
If we learn lessons, you know, as professionals in the ecosystem, you know, Making this cashless policy work. You know, let’s take note of that. Lessons. Let’s look at our data, you know, make sense of the data so that the pressure on people can actually be reduced. Thanks once again for reading, we will love to hear your feedback and do share out this with your audience.
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