I was on Twitter on a basic November afternoon when I saw “photo leaks” of the new Naira notes. The government decided a few months before the election to design new Naira notes and phase the old ones out of circulation. By November 23rd 2022, our President Buhari launched the New naira notes. Lights—Camera—Action.
By early December, I started hearing a bunch of things, it started with the “old notes would no longer be legal tender by the end of January 2023”, but I wasn’t stressed by that bit of information, next we got reminded that we would be limited to withdrawing 20k a day for individuals in a bid to drive our adoption of the cashless policy. Now that was the part I found to be weird and alarming.
Yeah, I know that we have over 100 fintech apps on the app stores, but that does not mean we have the infrastructure to handle such a drastic change in such a short period. Even the cost of onboarding new users to our already stressed banking infrastructure is another headache on its own.
If you are a Nigerian, you can relate to the stress that comes with making simple transactions at the end of each month. It is the time of the month when most people get paid and when we have a huge spike in transactions, and there are a ton of issues that comes with this, ranging from failed transactions to frequent bank network downtimes, to an insane amount of people in banking halls to either make a complaint or get their money.
With the unavailability of Naira notes plaguing the country, this is what we experience daily. Now the best time to make a transaction is very early in the morning (5 am-7 am) or very late at night (11 pm-12:00 am). Most of us who used to have a high level of trust in the banking system when it comes to transactions now give our banks the side eye.
What does this have to do with the women in the market?
We are suffering, the women in the market are suffering, I cannot even sell enough to transport myself back home. There is no money to buy or sell anything.
Mama Rita (The first picture in this post), sells the things you’d use to make soups. Especially melon seeds to make melon soup. Before this new policy, she usually sells close to 4KG of melon seeds in one market day. Right now, she is lucky if she is able to sell them off within a week (6 market days). She makes use of her daughter’s bank account to collect payments from those who want to make payments by transfer, even if these payments are basically micro transactions. The wait time to get confirmation of the amount getting into her kid’s account is absurd, it can take hours. This is simply because the buyer gets debited and it takes a while for the recipient account to receive the amount. I understand that businesses need trust to grow, but here is the issue, a good number of these transactions get reversed or totally fail. Say I buy 400g of Melon for N340, I can get debited when I send the payment in the market and she would let me go after 20mins of waiting and not seeing the alert, because of you know, trust. Turns out that one of 3 things would happen:
She gets the money later that evening and she is able to continue her business to an extent, assuming at all she needs to spend money on can be settled with transfers from her end.
I pay with my card to a POS agent who is in the market and who has limited cash, the POS agent acts as a sort of mini bank for these women who have customers willing to make payments with their cards. The customers can also transfer to the bank accounts tied to these Point Of Sale machines. What happens is that the agent is mostly able to give them cash to return back home and not near enough to restock their goods.
The money is unable to get to her account due to some weird network issue and it reversed back to mine, which means I have to go back to initiate that transaction again when I eventually see the reversal alert. Now I am a decent guy and I’d do my best to make that payment, but who is to say that other people will?
This means Mama Rita might never get paid and she has basically given out the foodstuff for free.The money gets lost in limbo. Now, this is something that happens from time to time, but due to the stress our infrastructure is taking, it has become a bit more frequent. The money leaves my account and never gets reversed, and it also never gets to Mama Rita. I have heard at least two cases where people have made transactions and the bank simply can’t find the money anymore.
The last two scenarios are enough to break the trust of most people, especially the people who were termed unbanked and forced into this version of financial inclusion. An inclusion where they have digital accounts but have more difficulty accessing an exchange of value (money).
It is interesting to note that these women get what they sell in bulk from farm owners, these farmers do not have bank accounts and only accept cash. This is the issue of the woman who sells Fresh vegetables, well not so fresh given that she now has to hold on to them for almost 3 times the usual duration.
She has to go all the way to Rijana in Southen Kaduna to get vegetables, and it is possible to get up to 100k worth of vegetables. The people she is buying from are “unbanked”, she does not control or influence their ability/decision to use technology to carry out transactions. She is a victim of a poorly implemented policy. So are many other women. Like the others, she just prays to sell enough to take herself back home, the transportation here is still very cash-heavy, especially as she would need to carry the vegetables back home with her.
In conclusion, I think it is too late to go back on this policy, but we can come up with solutions to reduce their suffering while also going hard on upgrading our infrastructure to accommodate the growing amount of users being onboarded into the system. Help the unbanked, not punish them.
P.S., I got into photography this year. Cool right? My friend Babangida iklima Shehu has been my teacher. Here are a few of the photos I took that day.
How does it feel to be blessed in your writing and the photos you take?
Flexed with your writing and still had to drop some nice shots as well. Continue