CBN is poised to stop the printing of small denomination Naira in polymer notes because they fade quickly.
Its Deputy Governor, Mr Tunde Lemo, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Washington on the sideline of the ongoing Spring Meeting of the World Bank and the IMF.
By the middle of the year, we will start to produce the second generation of lower denomination notes, now in paper not in polymer.
My plea is that Nigerians should exercise patience with us; it wasn’t the fault of the CBN, it was just because we had to go back to the drawing board to rethink `Project Cure’ in the light of the wish of the public that we should not go ahead with the N5000 notes and lower denomination.
We will correct that in the course of the year. Polymer certainly will be phased out. In fact, we are phasing out polymer. No new note is being printed in polymer now.’’
Lemo told NAN that when the CBN was going to introduce the polymer currencies, its search showed that they could last longer than ordinary paper notes.
However, with the benefit of hindsight, we probably should not have dumped polymer because, yes, the substrate lasts longer, but the in-consubstrate began to fade; we didn’t realise that at the time of introduction.
So, part of `Project cure’ actually was actually to move away from polymer substrate to paper, unfortunately we had a push-back because of the issues around N5000 note and coins.
The entire program was put in abeyance, otherwise by now we should have stopped producing polymer.’’
Read full article from source : Leadership
No comments:
Post a Comment