The Central Bank of Nigeria has disclosed how a commercial bank in Ogun State improperly handled roughly N4 million in new naira notes.
The CBN claimed to have discovered several banks secretly storing the fresh notes in their vaults.
In an interview with reporters in Abeokuta, the capital of Ogun State, on Tuesday, Kayode Makinde, the deputy director of the banking supervision department at CBN Lagos, made this revelation.
Makinde, who led a team on the monitoring exercise in Ogun, claimed that some commercial banks were undermining the CBN’s attempts to make the new naira notes available to customers. He said that they had been travelling throughout the State for the previous three weeks to ensure compliance with the CBN’s instructions regarding the issuance of the new notes.
The CBN team leader urged Nigerians to place the responsibility for the lack of fresh naira notes on the commercial banks rather than the central bank.
He warned that such a bank and its personnel will face appropriate sanctions when the team discovered a commercial bank that improperly handled fresh notes supplied to it by the CBN.
“We came across one of the commercial banks that couldn’t account for almost four million naira of the new notes and appropriate sanction will be placed on them,” Makinde stated.
He continued, stating, “We witnessed some trying to hoard fresh notes,” but others had terrible cash management, so they were forced to upload the same into their ATM machines.
According to Makinde, the bank officials were instructed to upload the existing notes and get in touch with their Central Cash Management Unit, which has direct connection to the CBN, rather than trying to ration the new notes.
“We came across instances of sabotage on the part of operators, we will take the case up and will be dealt with appropriately.”
Makinde added that the commercial banks were directed not to pay out the new notes via the counter, but other notes.
“Some of them did that and ran out of cash. Some of the branches deployed resourceful cash management skills and they never ran out of cash while other experience cash run out and are still waiting for their source,” he said.
