As bank customers rush to beat the Tuesday deadline for turning in their old high-value Naira notes in Ilesa, Osun State, many residents have lamented that local banks are only interested in collecting their old notes and are not giving them the redesigned notes in exchange.
The situation has led many to be out of pocket even though they have money in their accounts at various banks.
Microsecondnews spoke to a few of the customers in various local branches of Nigeria’s foremost banks.
A Union Bank customer spoken to said she spent the whole of Tuesday at the bank in order to deposit her old naira notes and obtain the newly redesigned notes.
The customer identified herself as Mummy Dara, a businesswoman, made another trip to the same bank on Thursday to deposit money collected from customers between Tuesday and Thursday.
She lamented that on both occasions, she only succeeded in depositing her old notes, but was unable to get new notes as the bank said they did not have it in their vaults.
Every customer is still producing the old notes. I have not seen one single new note. I planned to stop accepting the old notes from Wednesday after I deposited all I had on Tuesday. However, none of the customers who came into my shop had new notes to buy with. So I had to accept old notes again, she said.
She added that from today, Friday, she stopped accepting old notes because she envisaged that there would be more difficulties transacting business at the banks from Monday, as people get desperate to turn in their old notes.
“If it means losing sales, so be it!” she declared. She, however, said she might allow some of her trusted retailers to carry out goods on credit till next week when they could pay with the new notes.
A customer of Wema Bank, who identified himself simply as Diran said he had successfully turned in the old notes in his possession, but had been unable to secure the new notes.
‘I gathered all the old notes from my family members and deposited them. Now, we are broke as we were unable to secure the new notes. All we have are the N50 and N100 notes, which are not enough to do any serious thing, he lamented.
He was at the Okesa branch of the bank as early as 8 am with the hope of getting the new notes. He was however met with a crowd of customers who equally came out early with a view to laying their hands on the new notes.
Most of the branches of the local banks were besieged by anxious customers as early as 8:am this morning.
Tempers flared in some of the branches, as customers expressed their frustration with the situation and vented their anger on security staff trying to organize the crows and fellow customers.
The situation is the same with many cities across the country on Friday. In Lagos, bank customers in FESTAC, Ikorodu, Ikeja, and Abule Egba told MSN on Friday they were unable to get hold of the new notes. The ATMs of the banks were still dispensing old notes as the various branches claimed they were still waiting for their consignment of new notes.
See some of the pictures capturing the scenes from Ilesa below.
You can click here to see the clip of a queue of customers that stretched from inside Union Bank, Roundabout, Ilesa all the way onto the motorway here.
