TRIBUNE NG
The Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN on Friday berated commercial banks in Port Harcourt, Rivers State over their refusal to dispense the sum of N4.5billion newly redesigned naira notes, distributed to them in Port Harcourt.
Maxwell Okafor, Branch Controller CBN, Rivers State, who led the CBN enforcement monitoring team on the newly redesigned bank notes to some commercial banks and markets in Port Harcourt, said between Thursday and Friday, the apex bank has disbursed about N4.5bn newly redesigned naira notes to commercial banks in Rivers State and wondered why many bank customers are not getting the new naira note.
He expressed concern that some commercial banks in Port Harcourt were deliberately frustrating the efforts of the apex bank in implementing the disbursement of the new Naira notes by hoarding them in their vaults.
He charged the commercial banks to stop dispensing old notes, saying that another N2 billion of the new notes will be injected into commercial banks in Port Harcourt within the next 24 hours.
Okafor said; “We have been monitoring the dispensing of the new naira note and the impression we have is not encouraging. We have visited some banks and one of the banks we visited was not dispensing the new naira notes.
“Their ATM machines are not functioning even as early as at the time we came. We had it on good authority that the banks received money from CBN. Some of these banks received money yesterday and the money is still in their vaults.
“In some of the banks, their ATM machines are down. So there is no explanation for their actions and CBN has warned that there will be serious consequences for hoarding this new naira note and giving it to special customers.
“Many of the banks we visited are not dispensing the new naira note. On Thursday we injected about N2.5bn into the banks in Port Harcourt and in less than 24 hours we injected another N2bn.
Many of the ATMs are not dispensing so it’s a situation we want to look at very critically and there will be consequences.
