On Friday, The Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) urged President Muhammadu Buhari to persuade the Central Bank of Nigeria to reinstate the old N1000 and N500 notes as legal tender while the new currency is being printed to replace the old ones.
The party pleads to the President and members of the public at the release of its manifesto on Friday in Abuja.
Alhaji Falalu Bello, the national chairman of the PRP, criticised the scarcity of fresh Naira bills in use and urged prompt action to lessen the distress of the populace.
Bello also noted that the government’s decision to remove almost N2 trillion from circulation and print N300 billion was a formula for financial difficulty.
In a statement at the presentation of their manifesto, he said “Any policy that denies citizens access to their money is not good and is not a good policy.
“It (the Naira Redesign Policy) is a man-made crisis that is avoidable. We ask the President to tell the financial regulator to return our money.
“Although President Muhammadu Buhari has just about three months to leave office, history beckons him to take for Nigeria’s masses some important decisions that will ease their livelihood, make lives more meaningful and begin to address corruption in the land which has made lives unbearable.
“An exercise that withdraws over N2 trillion and prints only N300 billion with the result that people don’t have access to their legitimate credit balances and have not been given new currencies in place of the old ones they deposited is most certainly wrong, inhuman, and could be said to be illegal as it does not pass the reasonable standard test put in the CBN Act of 2007.
“We, therefore, ask President Muhammadu Buhari to immediately instruct the CBN to return to Nigerians the old currencies it has caused them to deposit with Nigerian banks and allow those old currencies to remain legal tender until the CBN prints enough currencies to replace old ones.”
Nigerians have plunged into more hardship and tension since the extension of the date for the Old Naira deposit to February 10.
