The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has accused commercial banks of sabotaging its efforts in replacing mutilated notes with new ones in the country.
Its Acting Director, Communications Department, Mr Isaac Okorafor, made the allegation in Lagos yesterday in an interview.
Okoroafor was reacting to lamentation from Nigerians on the high level of mutilated notes in the country.
The CBN spokesperson said the apex bank was aware of the development and had taken several measures to address the rising incidence of mutilated notes in the country.
According to him, one of the steps taken by the CBN in mopping up the mutilated notes from the system was reduction in the amount it charges banks for sorting the dirty notes for clean ones from N12,000 to N1,000 per box.
Okorafor lamented to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the reduction in charges for the commercial banks which lasted for three months from Jan. 2 to March 28 was to encourage them to bring back more dirty notes to CBN.
He said the sorting charges which used to be N12,000 was later raised to N2,000 per box after the March 28 deadline when the window was closed.
He said the opportunity was limited to lower denomination naira notes comprising N50, N20 and N10 notes.
A cross section of Nigerians have expressed disgust over the mutilated notes in circulation, mainly smaller denomination comprising of N5, N10, N20, N50 and N100 notes.
He said the bank had adopted another option of withdrawing the unfit notes from circulations rather than depending mainly on the commercial banks on the task.
Okorafor said the bank had started engaging associations in various markets to encourage traders to change genuine dirty notes for new ones.
This, he added, would not attract any cost to traders.
“The bank has already taken the new measure to Kano, Kaduna and Abuja and also intends to bring it to the south,” he said.