Over the years, the value of many local currencies has performed woefully relative to major currencies like the US dollar due to inflation and so on... The Naira, the official currency of Nigeria isn't left out in this mess. The governor of the central bank of Nigeria had tried all he could think of to rescue the national currency but its value has continued to decline, leaving all of us frustrated and concerned about the future of our only currency.
The worst CBN Ever!
It's already heading to two years since the government banned cryptocurrency in the country as they believed the adoption of this new technology had affected the value of the Naira. The authorities also argued that the decline could be from Forex traders and online websites like Abokifx that display the conversion rates. The governor also went as far as declaring the website illegal. However, Ng citizen on TwitterNg has criticized this move and stated that it had no impact on the currency's value.
The latest move by this same governor was to redesign the country's currency. For some unknown reasons, they believed that the naira was over-circulating, leading to a decline in its value, and believed after redesigning the naira notes, they will set a deadline as to when to deposit all physicals to the banks, then the currency will recover. Unfortunately, as it has always been, the redesign was a complete disaster.
- No new design ( only color changed)
- Only 100, 200, 500, and 1000 naira denominations were changed, leaving smaller denominations.
- The color from the new naira note washes when the notes get wet. This made it so difficult to tell if the notes are fake or real.
The crises are never over!
The deadline has passed, the citizens have deposited back their physical cash and no one is left with cash. You might be wondering or asking what about the new notes. Well, Banks have limited the amount of cash citizens can withdraw to 20,000 naira daily that's about $44. In fact, it's very difficult to get this 20,000 from the bank because they've claimed that there is no enough cash in the bank. This has led to crisis in the country.
Bitcoin solves this!
Yes, Bitcoin fixes this! Bitcoin and other majority of other crypto coins are decentralized. For this reason, lifting the crypto ban and giving citizens the freedom to utilize the blockchain would be the smartest decision ever from the government. But the governor won't! because he has a Goat head. Nevertheless, we don't need his approval to adopt the blockchain as its free and we are already utilizing its features.
Recently, an idea occurred to me about the possibility of paying for goods and services using stablecoins such as Hive dollars or other USD-pegged stablecoins. This will one day be a reality. And I can't wait for that day.