The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has announced that President Muhammadu Buhari will unveil the newly redesigned naira notes on Wednesday, November 23, 2022.
Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele disclosed this, Tuesday, during the apex bank’s Monetary Policy Committee monthly meeting in Abuja, saying the bank will no longer wait till the target date of Thursday, December 15, 2022, initially set for the unveiling.
Fast-tracking the unveiling, the CBN Governor argued, will help hasten the phasing out of the existing naira notes.
And as if to counter the Senate which had earlier protested the time allowed for the mop up of the expiring notes, Emefiele declared: “100 days is enough for any person from any part of Nigeria to deposit his money in the bank and get his money when the new notes are released.
“For information, indeed, we are no longer waiting till December 15th to unveil and begin to release the new notes.
“By the special grace of God, tomorrow, which is the 23rd of November 2022, the President has graciously accepted to unveil the new currencies and the new currencies will be unveiled tomorrow at the Federal Executive Chamber by 10am.”
The CBN Governor maintained emphatically that the apex bank will not shift the deadline for all old notes to be returned to commercial banks in exchange for newly designed ones.
Also at the meeting, the CBN Monetary Policy Committee jerked up the monetary policy to 16.5% from 15.5% while all other parameters remained unchanged.
The bank had, late October, announced that it was redesigning 200, 500, 1,000 naira notes, declaring that existing notes would seize to be regarded as legal tender by January 31, 2023.
And just last week, the Senate promised to provide legislative support for the policy to redesign the naira.
The senate resolution followed a motion on the policy by the Chairman of Senate Committee on Banking, Insurance and other Financial Institutions, Senator Sani Uba.
While the lawmakers supported the move to redesign the naira, they kicked against the deadline of Tuesday, January 31, 2023, to pay all cash in circulation into banks, maintaining that it was too short.
The upper legislative chamber, however, called for aggressive enlightenment of the populace, especially in the rural areas, to ensure that all Nigerians were duly informed about the new policy.
