DOES THE CBN KNOW THIS?

There is this woman in my neighbourhood I do not make purchases from except it is absolutely necessary. If I must buy from her, I ensure that I give her only rough or mutilated banknotes. And if I do not have any dirty notes to give her, and I am unable to buy from elsewhere, I defer such purchases.

But there is this other middle-aged lady who peddles miscellaneous wares....including recharge cards....that I feel safe to pay with neat banknotes.

That was until yesterday when I "caught" intentionally squeezing a N500 note! I accosted her only to realise....to my dismay....and utter disgust....that the violent squeeze she delivered onto the crisp note was intentional!

She told me that since genuine notes were made of special paper, the ability of a mercilessly-squeezed note to rise promptly is the widely-accepted sure test of identifying genuine notes! "A note that does not rise after squeezing is fake", she persisted!

She went further to inform me that such violent sqeezes are usually reserved for high denominations like N500 and N1,000 notes. She added that most market men and women usually reject the latter categories of notes at night when poor visibility may lead them to accept fake notes in error!

All my efforts at convincing her that she was only mutilating our currency notes unnecessarily was in vain! My copious explanations that the CBN expends humongous amounts to print these notes whose life cycles are clandestinely shorter than notes of other climes fell on deaf ears!

She merely countered that if government officials do not use our resources to print banknotes, they would surely steal those resources anyway! Knowing fully well that some element of truth...albeit crude....may reside in her argument, I gave up trying to convince her...

And I wonder: Is the Central Bank Of Nigeria aware of this fact? How can it checkmate this menace if it is not even aware of it?

Hard as I tried to exonerate our government from this disaster, I kept coming back to the same conclusions:

Failure of governance!
It is government's failure to educate the citizenry that makes them to have such mindsets.

It is pervasive corruption in the land that leads government officials to steal funds meant for educating the masses. It is the realisation of such thievery in government that makes our citizens to have such mindsets as illustrated above!

Dr Tosin Akindele is a medical practitioner and public affairs analyst.