3 Costly Queues this Weekend
Old Queues, New Queuers, and the Naira Queries
The average Nigerian will find herself/himself in one or more of three queues this weekend.
This January, the first month of the last year of Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency, the people find themselves in 3 separate but simultaneous existential queues.
The old queue, the perennial one, is the long wait for people to buy petrol in filling stations.
There are anti-queue quickies, though, at the end of every mile - guys who offer fuel in jerricans without delay for those who can pay between N350 and N450 per litre.
The new queue, the present one, is the lost hours of viable women and men who want to receive their Permanent Voters Card (PVC) for the February 25, 2023 general elections. The deadline for collection is tomorrow, January 29, 2023.
There’s great enthusiasm to vote this time, especially among the young and middle-aged, who together represent over 92% of the 9.5 million newly registered voters.
The Naira queue, the perplexing one, is the one forced on people who are neither ready to queue for fuel nor ready to queue for PVCs. They are forced to deposit all the 3 highest denominations of the old currencies in their possession in the bank in 2 days' time, January 30, 2023.
According to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the N200, N500, and N1000 notes cease to be legal tender by January 31, 2023.
This measure is the high point of the CBN’s demonetisation policy in the bid to retrieve cash stored out of bank vaults towards achieving the cashless economy policy. But there are complaints about the little time (3 months) given and the scarcity of the new notes, among other concerns.
There are several reports that those ready to deposit the old currencies do not have the new notes to spend. Thus, there are 2 sub-queues here: the queue to get new notes to spend and the queue to deposit the old notes.
Old Queues: A Timeline of Fuel Queues
Many reasons have been given for incessant queues at filling stations to get fuel, especially petrol. And as many complaints as to the waste of man hours, when people are forced to mortgage the productive hours of their day for affordable fuel at the filling stations.
Below is a timeline of incoherent reasons for fuel scarcity in Nigeria in the last 4 months.
New Queuers - Young people’s quest for their PVC
Many of those in these queues at various INEC offices are between the ages of 18 and 35. Some are newly conceived voters who have just reached the voting age of 18.
The majority are newly converted voters who just realised they had options beyond the traditional binary party options between APC and PDP. The thoughts of viable candidates from other parties, especially the Labour Party and the NNPP have resulted in late subscribers for the voting tool - the PVC.
Interestingly, the youngest group of voters, aged between 18 and 34 years made up 76.56 per cent of the 9.5 million newly registered voters between June 28th 2021 and July 31st 2022.
Next, in decreasing order to the youth’s 76.6 per cent, middle-aged persons (35 - 49 years old) made up 16.5 per cent of the newly registered voters. The elders (50 - 69 years old) constituted 6.2 per cent, while the old people (70 years and above) were 0.8 per cent of the newly registered voters.
All the 9.5 million people newly registered during the Continuous voter registration (CVR) window account for the 11% increase in the total registered voters from 84 million in the last general election in 2019 to 93.5 million in the 2023 election which holds in 27 days' time.
Hopefully, more young and old people will have their PVCs with the INEC’s extension of the deadline for the collection of PVCs from Jan 22, 2023 to Jan 29, 2023.
“For this reason, the timeframe for the collection of PVCs is extended by eight days. Instead of ending on Sunday, 22nd January 2023, the collection of PVCs will continue until Sunday, 29th January 2023.
“At the moment, the period of collection is 9.00am - 3.00pm daily (including Saturdays and Sundays)”, Festus Okoye, National Commissioner and Chairman of the Information and Voter Education Committee of INEC, said.
“Similarly, the commission is disturbed by allegations of discriminatory issuance of PVCs in some locations. This is against the law. All bonafide registrants are entitled to their PVCs and to use them to vote on Election day in any part of the country where they are registered.
“Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) have been directed to ensure that no such practices occur nationwide and take immediate disciplinary action against violators”, He added.
Naira Queries - NBA writes Meffy on Money
Few Nigerians understand the CBN’s good or bad intentions for withdrawing the old N200, N500, and N500 notes. What the majority know, however, is the difficulty in totally forfeiting the old when the new has not fully come.
However, the CBN, for all its demonetisation purposes, appears to be ready to release the new, but not enough, until the people, especially those with huge private vaults of cash, have returned it to the banks or forfeited the value on those notes.
There are speculations that the newly released notes are finding their way into some privileged private hands who just want to replenish their private vaults before the deadline than in the ATMs for public use. But the bottom line is that there are no sufficient new notes for people to do their badly-needed cash transactions.
However, The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in its letter to the Central Bank Governor, Godwin Emefiele, popularly called Meffy, commended the CBN’s demonetisation move but queried its methods.
“It will be recalled that in 1984 the military government sought to crack down on corruption and fix a debt-ridden and inflated economy by demonetisation. The government issued new currency notes and recalled the old banknotes which were rendered unusable after the prescribed two-week timeline.
“The demonetisation policy didn't work as planned. The economy collapsed; within a year of the demonetisation, there was a coup which removed the head of state, (and the) naira was devalued as the economy collapsed.
“Some of the issues that plagued the 1984 demonetisation are recorded to include:
a) A short deadline — the policy came into effect on 1 April 1984 — the government gave a 2-week period for the exchange of old notes and limited the amount an individual could convert legally to $7,000 (which was about NGN9, 100 at the time);
b) As a result of the deadline, businesses came to a grinding halt as traders stopped selling goods for fear of receiving old notes which could not be exchanged;
c) Shortage of new notes - inordinate queues were seen at the banks as Nigerians waited daily to exchange old notes for new ones but often returned at the end of the day without the exchange because the banks were in short supply;
d) Exploitation and kick-backs — essentially there were reports of more corruption as banks and bank managers exploited customers who were desperate to trade in their old notes;
e) Poor information dissemination — given the communication infrastructure of that time, rural dwellers did not receive information on the deadline in time adding to the queues in the banks around the deadline;
f) Stranded old notes — it was widely reported that owing to failure to secure new notes in the exchange (as the banks eventually ran out of new notes and the government failed to extend the deadline), many Nigerians were left with large amounts of old notes which became useless as they had ceased to be legal tender. There is at least one report of a trader who committed suicide because he was stranded with about NGN 200,000 of the old notes.”
The NBA warned the CBN and the Federal Government against following countries that implemented similar bad examples with disastrous consequences for their economies. It mentioned Ghana, Zaire, the Soviet Union, Myanmar, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and India, especially.
However, the legal body admonished the CBN and the Federal Government to tow the path of countries that had successful demonetisation programmes such as Australia, The European Union, and the United Kingdom.
Responding to the people's anxieties earlier today, President Buhari promised that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is working on initiatives to “prevent chaos” over the distribution of the new notes.
Wish you a pleasant weekend, filled with plenty new banknotes, a permanent voters card, and an easy drive-in for your fuel refills!