Eleven governors elected on the platform of APC met with President Buhari at the State House over the excruciating cash crunch in the country as a result of the new naira redesign policy which is making the lives of many average Nigerians unbearable.
The President rejected the wise counsel of the governors to allow the concurrent use of the new and the old notes and rather urged Nigerians to give him a seven-day grace to resolve the conundrum.
The first four days have yielded no traction on easing the cash crunch rather the issue has become a matter of litigation by the political class across the isles, some pursuing a self-serving revanchist partisan game whilst others are very concerned with the suffering of the masses in their states.
Putting the seven-day moratorium demanded by the president in the context of how other pressing state matters have dragged endlessly for months and years without any resolution, one could safely hazard what the outcome of this interregnum would be.
One recent example is the committee set up by the President to resolve the fuel scarcity which has subsisted for over five months now with all its existential extenuating headwinds for the economy and national security. The committee has not had any meeting beyond their inaugural convocation yet the scarcity has now worsened in many parts of the country, threatening the social-economic fabric of the nation.
Nigerians do not deserve to see another committee with the usual nebulous terms of reference and offhanded timelines.
The unresolved cash crunch and fuel crisis have now metastasized into another emergency thus constituting a tripod of Sword of Damocles over the February 2023 general elections.
The third and the newest in the catalog is under the purview of the Ministry of Communication and just as the CBN and the NNPC have handled the redesigned naira note and the fuel crisis with perfunctory bureaucracy respectively, the Ministry Of Communications is watching as almost all Point-Of-Sale (POS) platforms in the country are practically shutdown for lack of network.
Most of the queues at the gas stations are not caused by the stations not dispensing the product but customers are locked down after almost every transaction as they are not able to make payments with the POS machines after banks have practically stripped them of liquid cash.
It would be most unfortunate for the president to set up another committee after the seven days as that would amount to taking Nigerians for granted in their most trying times.
Most of the political parties demanding no further extension of the date set for the old naira notes to cease to be legal tender know that they do not stand any chance in the coming elections and so would rather play the role of butterfingers disrupting all ecosystems instrumental to the election. Thank God the Supreme Court has granted some reprieve.
Bukola Ajisola, bukymany@yahoo.com
THE PRESIDENT’S SEVEN-DAY MORATORIUM
