Naira redesign: Nigerians can sue FG, CBN, commercial banks for losses — Lawyers

TRIBUNE

As many Nigerians continue to count monumental losses as a result of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Naira redesign policy, which Nigerians claim has disrupted lives, business activities and threatened the survival of SMEs, YEJIDE GBENGA-OGUNDARE, in this report, explores the feasibility of legal remedies to compensate for their losses.

For weeks, cash crunch, arising from what has been described as poor implementation of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Naira redesign policy has been a major issue in Nigeria for the teeming populace; including small and medium scale enterprises that have been facing myraid of operational challenges, both in rural and urban communities across the country.

Nigerians, who hitherto lived and thrived in a cash carrying economy and transacted major day to day business of surviving and greater percentage of economic activities with cash, have been groaning under the heavy burden of getting the almost nonexistent cash for their activities.

For the first time, people had to use naira to buy naira in their country and many couldn’t access their funds that were trapped in banks while many became beggars in a bid to get physical cash to meet major needs as online transactions also continue to fail and small business owners began to reject cashless transactions.

Indeed, the effect of the CBN policy and the chaos caused in the lives of people seem unprecedented;  people lost their lives and businesses while wasting countless productive hours on never-ending queues trying to get their money, from the bank, even POS operators couldn’t get money to run their outlets and many closed shops while people who need cash for their livelihoods on a daily basis couldn’t lay their hands on any.

Meanwhile, the informal sector in Nigeria is large and thrives basically on physical cash transactions without which it cannot survive; the seeming underestimation of the cash needs of the majority of Nigerians whose whole existence depends on the informal sector by the Central Bank of Nigeria led to the massive cash crisis which had never been experienced in the country, even during the global meltdown.