Waking up as early as 4, 5 am has become a way of life for most Nigerians as they Indian-file to banks for unavailable cash, to filling stations for hard-to-get fuel and to designated INEC collection centres for PVCs they may never return home with. The joke these days is what are you queuing for? Is it money, gasoline or voter’s card?
THEWILL considers what may likely happen with the mother of all queues in late February and mid-March when millions of voters will throng polling stations to elect the same people responsible for the ubiquitous serpentine formations choking the very life out of them. Michael Jimoh reports.
Around 7.30am last Friday, two journalists left their office in GRA Ikeja to a branch of their bank on Mobolaji Bank Anthony Way. From their point of departure on Remi Fani-Kayode Street, a steady pace would get them to the bank in less than half an hour. They did. By the time they got to the bank premises, there were already people there, none of them smiling.
A middle-aged woman sat on a plastic chair by the bank’s entrance, her right hand supporting her right cheek. Others stood, some with hands akimbo, some with hands folded across their chest and nearly all of them looking quite apprehensive. A soldier arrived on a motorbike, said hello and waited with others outside the bank. Another followed not long after. It was not hard to see why.
The previous day Thursday February 1, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria Godwin Emefiele had directed banks to start paying the new naira notes over the counter and not only via their Automated Teller Machines. Scarcer than the dollar in war time soon after the deadline for the currency swap ended on January 31 and even after the February 10 extension, Nigerians hoped to be paid the redesigned new naira notes as instructed by Emefiele. It never got to be.
At about two minutes to 8 when banks open their revolving doors, those outside were already restive. For many of them, it was like eternity, as if the two minutes will drag on forever. At last, a bank security guard green-lighted the waiting customers at 8 on the dot, eliciting some sigh of relief from them. Since the governor of the apex bank in the country had given the command, he expected the new notes would readily be available in many banks and paid OTC to long-suffering customers.
The anxious customers soon filed into the banking hall, the soothing breeze of the air-conditioners welcoming them. “I hope there is money to withdraw,” everyone seemed to ask at the same time. “No,” some of the tellers, mostly female, replied. “We are still waiting for the new notes to be supplied,” they went on, thus dispelling any hope that the early arrivals would be lucky enough to be paid in the redesigned naira notes.
Never hope for too much in life, so the saying goes, so you won’t be too disappointed if what you hope for never comes. For the dozen-plus customers that Friday morning, it was exactly so. No new notes, period! But there was some respite however. Two of the tellers let on they have old notes, in mostly hundred and fifty naira notes, many of them torn, dirty and unsightly. “I have only three thousand naira to give each of you,” one said with Delphic finality. She then passed out withdrawal slips to those who wanted to have something to show for time wasted. Some did not and stormed off.
To say that much of the scenario described above was replicated in many banks across the country that weekend is an understatement. Customers of a branch of another bank on the same Mobolaji Bank Anthony Way experienced about the same thing as the journalists in the first branch they went to.
When THEWILL got there shortly after 8, there were two long queues starting from the ATM on both sides of the bank, the kind of snakelike lines you find on crucial election days early in the morning. Though the cashiers claimed they had no money – old or new – to dispense OTC, the ATM was actually dispensing some, which accounted for the interminable queues.
“I have been here since 6am,” a young woman with horse teeth and grandma spectacles warned, eyeing a chap who was begging the guy in front of her to help him withdraw, “and I will not allow any person to do any mago, mago here.”
Upon hearing that, others in the queue turned their baleful glare on the chap who soon disappeared from sight.
After dispensing N10,000 in the new 1000 denominations for about half an hour, the machine stopped. It had run out of cash.
Inside the hall, the story was the same: no new notes, no old notes.
“The ATM has run out of cash,” someone told a female teller. Yes, she knows. “We are doing something about it.”
Knowing the banker’s predilection for double speak, the chap wanted to know if the bank was going to input cash into the ATM right away so he can at least wait.
“We are waiting for the money to be supplied to us,” she finally admitted.
When the chap left the banking premises minutes later, both queues were growing ever longer and noisier, many of them waiting and hoping for cash they were not sure to collect.
With Nigeria on the cusp of general elections later this month and mid-March, many adult voters are yet to receive their PVCs thus necessitating the long queues at designated INEC collection centres around the country. Though by far shorter than queues in banks and other money-paying outlets, Nigerians are also having a hard time collecting their PVCs, almost as difficult in accessing their monies in banks.
Frustrated to no end, some have adopted some ruses thus lending credence to the claim that Nigerians are quite resourceful. One such ploy which has since gone viral shows how a pregnant woman finally got hers after trying and failing for nearly a week. Realising that pregnant women standing in queues were shown some deference by INEC officials, the unnamed woman made herself heavy – not with what you’ll expect but with bales and bales of clothing, a sizeable aluminum pan for that generous girth to simulate a far advanced woman with child, all of that concealed and made real by at least two leggings.
Needless to say that her ruse paid off. By the time we see her in her living room, she was deftly removing the props one after another and brandishing her PVC with a sense of relief that she finally got her way. “They gave me my PVC as a pregnant woman,” she says smilingly to a man in the background, continuing that “if no be dat one, e for reach years before I get am.”
Though she might be exaggerating the time it would take for anyone to receive his/ her PVC, there is certainly some truth in her declaration. It is taking pretty long for most eligible voters to access their PVCs now, especially with the elections just around the corner.
Which Queue Are You Joining Today – For Money, Petrol or PVC?
Nigeria is in a bind right now and it is not funny. Money is in short supply because of the currency swap of old naira notes for new ones. Petrol, the fuel that propels the wheel of the economy, is scarcer to find and, when available, you have to pay thrice the price it was for a litre months ago.
For the first time in their lives, Nigerians rich and poor are confronted with a situation they have never faced before since independence in 1960. The last time something close to this happened was in 1984 when most Nigerians had to fall in line for what became known as Essential Commodities – Essenco for short. Muhammadu Buhari, the incumbent president, was head of state at the time, having ousted the civilian government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari on December 31, 1983.
Uncertain of what may happen with the new military government, shop owners and shady distributors started hoarding commodities like rice, beans, sugar, groundnut oil, cement and much else. The new military regime wasted no time in forcing open such shops across the country, thus allowing Nigerians to queue up and make purchases of the essential commodities they lacked.
In the intervening years, there have been queues for mostly petroleum products through the military dictatorships of Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha to the civilian regimes of Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan. But never in the history of Nigeria has there been serpentine lines of citizens waiting to withdraw cash, buy petrol and access their PVCs all at once.
Commenting on the rather strange phenomenon in a publication by BusinessDay of January 29 headlined “Nigeria: A country of queues,” the duo of Iniobong Iwok and Nosa Igbinadolor states from the get-go that “in many cities across Nigeria today, the popular refrain is: “Which queue are you joining today- for fuel, PVC or new naira notes?” This has become necessary as a result of the important role the three items play in the scale of needs of Nigerians and in the economy of the country. The above-listed items have been made scarce, in the estimation of Nigerians, by dark powers that hold the country hostage.
“From collection of the permanent voter’s card (PVC) to qualify for voting, to purchasing of petrol for productivity in a country that is a member of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) but has perennial fuel scarcity, and to collection of new naira notes, it has been lamentation all the way.”
Referencing a study by Peter M. Lewis of the Warren Weinstein Chair of African Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the lamentation is as a result of “state failure and the attendant dysfunction of state institutions.” Tracing Nigeria’s crisis of governance to the ruling elite and public institutions that never work, Lewis goes on to say that they “have not provided essential collective goods, such as physical infrastructure, the rule of law, or legitimate symbols of state authority and political community.”
Added to that is their “inability to meet their responsibility to Nigerians,” which, “have over time resulted in unending and unyielding lines of Nigerians seeking an entrée to services that state authorities make extremely difficult to access.”
Continuing in their report, Iniobong and Igbinadolor insist that other countries have had a seamless currency change without the obstacles now confronting Nigerians. They cited the example of the UK where the Bank of England “has been gradually replacing its paper notes with polymer ones over a number of years, and in March 2022, the bank issued its six-month reminder to consumers and businesses about the withdrawal of legal tender status (or WOLTS) of the paper £20 and the paper £50 banknotes on 30 September 2022.”
On the other hand, the journalists claim, CBN “gave just over a month for citizens to exchange their old notes for new ones.”
This is pure fallacy because the currency swap by the CBN was announced October 26, 2022 till January 31, making it a clear 95 days. Despite this oversight on the part of the journalist, they seem to have struck a chord about the systemic failure of state institutions when they quoted another study conducted by Obasesam Okoi and MaryAnne Iwara. In their findings two years ago published in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, they submit that at the core of Nigeria’s systemic failure “is the crisis of governance, which manifests in the declining capacity of the state to cope with a range of internal political and social upheavals. There is an expectation for political leaders to recognize systemic risks such as terrorist attacks, herder-farmer conflict, and police brutality and put in place the necessary infrastructure to gather relevant data for problem solving. But the insufficiency of political savvy required to navigate the challenges that Nigeria faces has unleashed unrest across the nation and exacerbated existing tensions.”
To be sure, fuel shortages have become almost routine to Nigerians as Danfo buses ply Lagos roads. Last May, for instance, in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, residents were subjected to petrol scarcity that a journalist with Premium Times Mary Izuaka wrote about the consequent hardship it wrought on residents in Abuja.
“As fuel queues resurfaced across parts of the capital city on Friday,” Izuaka wrote, “many Nigerians are worried that they may have entered yet another season of suffering and lamentations.”
The journalist could have been speaking about what Nigerians are going through now. Even those she interviewed could have been speaking for motorists queuing up from sunup to sundown at filling stations across the country in the last couple of weeks.
One of them, a civil servant called Joseph, told Izuaka last May that “from what I’m seeing, I don’t think this is panic buying, I think there’s no fuel and whatever the reason might be I don’t know but the government needs to save us this time around because we don’t want to experience the suffering we had some months ago. I drove to town and the only fuel station that I saw selling was Total opposite NNPC Tower. There was too much queue there, that’s why I had to come down to this airport road.”
Already, there have been tragic and some near comic fallouts from the spontaneous queues in search of money, petrol and PVCs by Nigerians. Having tried and failed to withdraw money from his bank, a male adult in one of the banks in Lagos decided that the best way to get the bank staffers’ attention was a butt-baring act. In a similar solo protest, a woman decided to go in the buff, leaving only her bra and shorts.
While those solo acts can elicit a hearty guffaw, the same cannot be said of the man who collapsed and died in a bank queue in Port Harcourt recently. At an ATM machine in Benin City last week, students of the University of Benin had a run-in with soldiers. Were it not for the prompt intervention of the authorities, confrontations between military men and students can only be too predictable.
As it stands, Nigerians are not likely to end the queue culture anytime soon. Of course, millions of Nigerians of voting age will troop to the polls later this month and in mid-March. And therein lies the irony: the long-suffering populace now queuing for cash, petrol and PVCs will form the mother of all queues with the odd choice of voting for the same politicians who got them into the trouble they are now confronted with.
About the Author
Michael Jimoh is a Nigerian journalist with many years experience in print media. He is currently a Special Correspondent with THEWILL.
