The Central Bank of Nigeria has put a limit on cash withdrawals made by individuals and organizations with effect from January 9, 2023.
According to the new directive from the CBN, individuals will only be able to withdraw 100,000 naira per week over the counter, point of sale machines or automated tele machines, while organisations can only access 500,000 naira per week. Withdrawals above these limits will attract a processing fee of 5% for individuals and 10% for companies.
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Also, the Apex Bank says third party checks above 50,000 naira will not be eligible for payment over the counter, while ATM withdrawals should not exceed 20,000 naira per day. In addition, only denominations of 200 Naira and below will be loaded into the ATMs.
CEO, Finance with Muktar, Muktar Muhammed said on TVCBReakfast says every CBN policy has always attracted diverse reactions.
He noted that the challenge is not about whether the policy is right or wrong but that people are looking at the timing.
He added that the policy is not a new one, the only difference is just the reduction in limit. What the CBN is trying to do is to gradually move into the cashless policy.
Mr Muktar added that the way the CBN is going about it is not right especially considering those in the rural areas, which is a major challenge as well as the infrastructure.
Looking at the whole picture, the financial inclusion is there but some other persons will also have to suffer and those are the people who we want to bring into the banking space.
Speaking on if the CBN is doing enough to achieve E-Naira, Mr Muktar said
the E-Naira has not worked because the CBN say they have to redesign it and it has not brought anything different from what we have in the banking space.
Looking at all of these policies, CBN has their tools to guide against inflation and one of those tools is reduced liquidity in the system.
“When you have a banking system that over 85% of your liquidity is outside the banking space, it becomes a challenge for you to fight inflation using that tool, that is what the CBN was trying to achieve with the Naira redesign.
“Apart from that, a lot of fraud is perpetrated by cash.
“Also the greatest challenge in a cashless society is cyber security.
On the issue of curbing inflation with the design of the naira, Mr Muktar said value is not driven by how good the currency looks but what makes a currency good is its purchasing power comparable to other currencies.
According to him, the bottom line of all these policies, include security and monitoring.
“As a result of security, every policy that the CBN has implemented has been unable to keep up with the momentum.” What we mean is that the CBN does not control security, but because the physical side that is supposed to take care of security is not, they are indirectly dabbling into those sites to address those security challenges in order for their policy to begin to improve the lives of Nigerians and the economy.
“When you have a wonderful economic policy but are unable to guide against security difficulties, nobody wants to visit your nation because they believe it is unsafe.”
“As it stands now, the major difficulty of the naira is not merely the fact that we have not been able to make as much as we could.” The other is that we have been unable to attract investors to our economy. And you can only entice investors into your economy if you have fiscal policies in place, not just monetary policies,” Muktar noted.
