My name is Ibinabo Tamunokuro, and I am a Nigerian. Nigeria is one place that almost nothing works, it is the giant of Africa by population but its citizens are suffering daily.
It has gotten to a point where when faced with challenges we just try to adapt to it because change is hard or rare around here.
The government of Nigeria decided to change some of the old naira notes to new naira notes, lots and lots of money was spent to achieve this only for them to do a very poor job, did we complain about it? Yes we did, was anything done about it? No, we all moved on like nothing ever happened.
Then came the prohibition of the old naira notes as a legal tender, the government gave a time frame for all old notes to be deposited in banks so we can get new naira notes, a lot of Nigerian citizens complied, a lot did not and then came scarcity of cash in circulation.
Nigeria is still growing we have not gotten to a point where we can totally operate in a cashless society, there are sectors in the commercial activities that you can go all cashless but for some, one needs physical cash to get by.
Since there was scarcity of cash, the privileged few that had connections in banks and so many other establishments that had lots of cash at their disposal decided to sell cash, I mean they decided to sell naira notes, pathetic right? No scratch that, pathetic isn’t even enough to describe how this selling of naira notes were done. Like you literally have to buy your own hard earned money.
A lot of people decided to make enough money (profit) at the expense of their fellow Nigerians. The queues were too much in all the Nigerian banks, bankers were put under a lot of pressure, they were harassed by angry and pained citizens, they had to go undercover for fear of their lives and I tell you the list is endless.
If you want to withdraw money from the bank you can literally spend the whole day and might not even succeed .
It got worse as the day went by.
The most ironical part of this saga is that the government asked us not to use the old naira notes to carry out any form of transactions as it was not considered a legal tender anymore, but the ATMs were paying the same old naira notes we were trying to change, isn’t this ridiculous? Welcome to my
country, people😂
Tensions were rising every day until 15th February 2023 just after the love fiasco on the 14th of February here in Benin city we were faced with various tragedies.
Banks refused to accept old naira notes as at 15/02/2023, people were stuck with old notes, vendors and literally all sectors refused to accept old naira notes. How were the citizens supposed to get by? Hence the bloody protest by angry Nigerians.
Banks were destroyed to nothing, people were running wild already, all commercial activities were put on hold in the city, people were literally scared for their lives.
Since no one was willing to accept old naira notes a lot of people were doing lots and lots of transfers, bank apps were down, people’s debit cards were rejected over and again, nobody could make any transfer because all bank servers were down, there was an uproar in the city.
15th of February 2023 was one bad day in the city of Benin as few persons lost their lives during the protest and some were severely injured.
Where is Nigeria heading to? I do not know.
This is not a political post in any way, it is just a short sad story to explain the present circumstances of people in Nigeria using the Benin people as a case study.