Supreme Court Postpones CBN’S Deadline For The Exchange Of Old And New Naira Notes
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered the Central Bank of Nigeria to extend the deadline for switching from old to new Naira notes (CBN).
On the deadline day of Friday, February 10, 2023, the Federal Government was prohibited by a temporary order from discontinuing the acceptance of the old Naira notes by the Supreme Court.
On Monday, Kaduna, Zamfara, and Kogi State filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court against the Federal Government over the lack of old and new Currency notes as a result of the CBN’s naira redesign strategy.
The state governments expressed concern about the impact the CBN’s naira redesign program is having on their citizens.
They are thus asking the Supreme Court to issue a restraining order to prevent the government and CBN from carrying out the strategy.
The states are asking the Supreme Court to grant them an interim injunction preventing the Federal Government from carrying out its plan to end the timeframe within which the now-outdated 200, 500, and 1000 Naira denominations may no longer be legal tender on February 10, 2023. The states filed an ex-parte motion through their attorney, AbdulHakeem Uthman Mustapha (SAN), and are asking the court to grant them a preliminary injunction.
Without this Honourable Court’s intervention, Mustapha warned, “the Government and people of Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara State will continue to experience great hardship and would ultimately suffer great loss due to the inadequate and unreasonable time within which the Federal Government is embarking on the ongoing currency redesign policy.”
The states said that Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara States had a lack of new naira notes and that residents who had faithfully surrendered their old notes were finding it harder and often almost impossible to get new notes in order to carry with their regular operations.
The states argued that the CBN policy is making life very difficult for Nigerians and emphasized that the federal government’s ten-day extension is still inadequate to solve the difficulties associated with Nigerians exchanging their old Naira notes for new ones.
