Naira Scarcity: N’Assembly Workers Abandon Work, Queue For Cash

Office and other business activities at the National Assembly have virtually come to a halt as the staff members of the legislative institution have abandoned work to queue for cash at the various Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) located within the sprawling complex.

Although this trend has been since the commencement of implementation of the cashless policy by the Federal Government, the situation is getting worse on a daily basis as many of the banks operating within and outside the complex neither pay money to customers over the counter nor load their ATM machines with Naira notes for customers to withdraw.

Investigation carried out by Saturday Telegraph, indicates that residents of the Federal Capital Territory and its environs, now see the National Assembly as the easiest place to cash out money either from the ATM or over the counter in all the banks operating in Nigeria have branches at the complex.

This has resulted in intense congestion of the apex legislative complex every day, with its concomitant difficulties upon Nigerians clustering and seeking to withdraw cash at various banking points at the legislative Assembly.

Since the problem of obtaining cash got worse as a result of the banks claiming not to get enough cash supplies from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), a large chunk of bank customers from Abuja and its environs resorted to coming to withdraw from the National Assembly every day.

Saturday Telegraph also observed that, contrary to the directive of the apex bank that individuals should make a daily withdrawal of N100,000 or N20,000, some of the banks at the National Assembly, only pay 10,000 while others pay 5,000 per customer any time they are paying.

Some of the banks pay as low as 3,000 and 2,000 while few customers told our correspondent that they had received as low as N1,000. These meagre payments however, do not come on regular basis. It was noticed that some of the banks don’t pay anything to customers for a whole week or more.

This however, does not deter customers from gathering every day, stressing themselves in very tight ques, waiting in anticipation of the arrival of money via bank officials for payments.

Some times, the bank operators will give the customers numbers as a means of making them to maintain orderliness in the ques, an arrangement that does not provide the required solution as some customers, after being tired and having severe body pains due to standing for many hours, resort to distorting the ques while struggling to bypass themselves ro enter banking hall or get closer