The Senate yesterday asked the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN to extend the deadline for the exchange of old naira notes from the January 31 deadline to May 31, 2023.
The Senate has also urged the CBN to open an exchange window where people that don’t have bank accounts to deposit their old notes.
The resolution of the Senate was a sequel to a motion by Senator Sadiq Umar, APC, Kwara North who demanded an extension to July 31, just as he was worried by the insistence of the apex bank that there would be no such extension.
Recall that CBN had on October last year, said the old naira notes would seize to be legal tender as of January 31, but the Senate in December passed a resolution urging the CBN to extend the deadline to June 30.
Moving the motion, Umar who recalled that the Senate in its resolution on Dec. 28, 2022, urged the CBN to extend the use of the old notes from Jan. 31 to June 30, said that however, the apex bank had insisted on terminating the use of the old naira notes by end of Jan.
The Senator who lamented that there were no enough new naira notes in circulation and as such, moved that the date should be extended to July 31, said: “Experiences around the world have shown that such abrupt decisions if not controlled usually created chaos.
“The Senate should extend the use of the old notes to July 31.”
In their contributions, most Senators overwhelmingly threw their weight behind the extension, citing scarcity of the new notes both in the banks and at the various Automated Teller Machine points across the country.
