The Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered a suspension of the deadline for the swapping of old to new Naira notes by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
The Supreme Court issued an interim injunction restraining the Federal Government from suspending the acceptance of the old Naira notes on the Friday February 10, 2023 deadline.
Kaduna, Zamfara, and Kogi State Governments had on Monday filed a suit against the Federal Government at the Supreme Court over the scarcity of old and new Naira notes due to the CBN naira redesign policy.
The state governments expressed concern about the impact the CBN’s naira redesign program is having on their citizens.
They are asking the Supreme Court to issue a restraining order to prevent the government and CBN from carrying out the strategy.
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.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injunction, preventing the Federal Government from carrying out its plan to end the timeframe within which the now-outdated 200, 500, and 1000 Naira denominations may no longer be legal tender on February 10, 2023.
“Unless this Honourable Court intervenes, the Government and people of Kaduna, Kogi and Zamfara State will continue to go through a lot of hardship and would ultimately suffer great loss as a result of the insufficient and unreasonable time within which the Federal Government is embarking on the ongoing currency redesign policy,” Mustapha said.
The states said that Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara States had a shortage of new naira notes and that residents who had faithfully surrendered their old notes were finding it harder and often nearly impossible to obtain new notes in order to carry out 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 insufficient to address the difficulties associated with Nigerians exchanging their old Naira notes for new ones.
The case has been adjourned until February 15, 2023, on Wednesday.
