The Senate on Wednesday at the plenary urged the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to considerably adjust withdrawal limits in response to public outcry on its proposed weekly withdrawal on cashless policy.

Senate’s resolution followed the adoption of recommendations of the Committee on Banking, Insurance and other Financial Matters on the recent policy of CBN on cash withdrawal limits.

Senate also urged its committee to continue to undertake aggressive oversight of the CBN on its commitment to flexible adjustment of the withdrawal limit and periodically report the outcome to plenary.

It also resolved to support the CBN in the continuous implementation of transformational payments and financial industry initiatives in line with its mandate in accordance with the CBN Act.

Chairman of the committee, Uba Sani (APC-Kaduna), while presenting the report of the committee, said there are many misconceptions about the cashless policy.

He said the currency denominations of N5, N10, N50 and N100 remain legal tender and were unaffected by the naira redesign policy and was available for use across the country.

According to him, there are currently no processing fees applied to cash deposits, saying that unlimited amounts can be deposited without charge to enable seamless and unrestricted deposit of notes affected by currency redesign.

Mr Sani said there had been significant achievements in the Nigerian payment system since the cashless policy was introduced in 2012.

He said Nigeria had been adjudged Africa’s undisputed real-time and digital payments leader in real-time transactions in 2021.

He said this translated to the sixth in terms of the world’s most developed real-time payments, behind only India, China, Thailand, Brazil and South Korea.

He said the offtake of digital and real-time payment also helped Nigeria unlock $3.2 billion of additional economic output in 2021, representing about 0.6 per cent of the country’s GDP.

However, some senators, before the adoption of the recommendations of the report, raised concern over the planned implementation of CBN’s cash withdrawals limit, while some supported its implementation, saying that it was for the ultimate good of the country.

The Senate, also at plenary, confirmed President Muhammadu Buhari’s nomination of Aisha Ahmad and Edward Adamu for appointments as deputy governors of CBN. 

(NAN)