Nze Chidi DuruThe conviction and sentencing of Oluwadarasimi Omoseyin, a Nigerian actress, to six months imprisonment for spraying and stepping on the new naira notes at a social event in Lagos State highlights one of the fulcrums of my advocacy against the abuse of the Naira as published in an article titled: “Mr President and the Forex Concerns: An Invitation to Dare,” on 20 November 2023.
In that article, I made a strident call for respect and social decorum in the ways Nigerians relate with the Naira which is not just our national means of economic transactions but the symbol of our sovereign status as an independent nation.
Unfortunately, for reasons that still remain base, vain, and uneconomical, some Nigerians, across economic and social divides, have continued to make the spraying and stepping on Naira notes a social pastime to further their ego-tripping and brazen material exhibitionism.
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The truth is that the arrest and conviction of Oluwadarasimi appears rather exceptional because this imprudent conduct of spraying the Nigeria Naira notes is a commonplace oddity at any social gathering across the country. This is despite the admonition of the law which in Section 21(3) of the Central Bank of Nigeria Act 2007 (As amended) stipulates that: “Spraying of, dancing or matching on the Naira or any note issued by the Bank during social occasions or otherwise howsoever shall constitute an abuse and defacing of the Naira or such note and shall be punishable under the law by fines or imprisonment or both.”
As uneconomical as this curious practice is, a whole industry that subverts the Central Bank of Nigeria’s monetary policy mandate had developed around it, over the years. Crisp new Naira notes have become objects of sale rather than being means of economic exchange. New currency notes have been taken off the banks’ cashier cubicles to feed an underground merchandising network where respective Naira notes are sold at between 30 percent and 40 percent of their face values. This cost notwithstanding, it is not out of place to behold millions of these notes being sprayed and trampled upon at parties in a sickening exhibition of riches.
The industry itself has a value chain and supply line beginning from the Nigeria minting company to vendors and hawkers at social party venues. These ones conspicuously display the new notes as marketplace wares for sale at venues of social parties. Yet, our law frowns at this unbridled show of economic sabotage in public places. Section 21(4) of the same CBN Act, states that “It shall also be an offence punishable under Sub-section (1) of this section for any person to hawk, sell or otherwise trade in the Naira notes, coins or any other note issued by the Bank.”
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Yet, the perpetrators of this act have continued to distort the national economy by denying the mainstream transactional space the needed crisp notes which results in increased cost of handling currency notes and the prevalence of old, dirty notes in the economic space.
Our laws already declare Naira notes trading a crime and it should not just be seen as such on the surface, the security agencies should enforce the laws such that the conviction of Oluwadarasimi will not appear to be a specific, one-off sacrifice to appease some special interests rather than a commitment to sanitising the economic space for the good of all Nigerians.
It is on this count that I invite President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to personally take this gauntlet up as a personal advocacy to wean Nigerians off the growing epidemic of the abuse of the Naira. A starting point in the envisaged crusade against spraying and trampling on the Naira is to prohibit federal public servants including his ministers and heads of Ministries, Departments and Agencies from any act that can pass as spraying the Naira and trampling on it.
The security agencies must also be active on this front. The fact is that the crime of Naira spraying and trampling upon is a commonplace neighborhood crime. Thus, it will only require an exercise of determination and commitment for the security agencies to arrest the social miscreants that have made this practice an endemic vice culture within the larger conduct of Nigerians and make the Naira a respectable icon of our national existence.
Nze Chidi Duru is a serial entrepreneur and Deputy National Organising Secretary of the All Progressives Congress
