The Supreme Court on Wednesday adjourned the suit filed by the Kogi, Kaduna and Zamfara state governments challenging the naira redesign policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) till Wednesday, February 22
The seven-member panel of the apex court led by Justice John Okoro however said its February 8 interim injunction restraining the federal government from suspending the acceptance of the old naira notes on the Friday, February 10, 2023 deadline still subsists.
The development came as Nigerians were grappling with the scarcity of new naira notes, a development that has led to queues at banking halls, and automated teller machine (ATM) points.
The three states had approached the court praying it to restrain the CBN going ahead with the February 10 deadline for naira swap.
They contended that the implementation of the policy had caused untold hardship for their indigenes.
The federal government also filed a preliminary objection to the suit, arguing that the Supreme Court lacks the jurisdiction to entertain the matter.
The federal government also noted that the plaintiffs failed to join the CBN in the suit which has just the attorney-general of the federation (AGF) as the sole plaintiff.
At the court session on Wednesday, TheCable reported that Lagos, Katsina, Cross-River, Ogun, Ekiti, Ondo, and Sokoto states were represented in court and sought to be joined as co-plaintiffs in the suit.
Bayelsa and Edo states also sought to be joined as respondents.
In a short ruling, the apex court granted all the applications for joinder.
The court directed the processes should be amended to reflect the states that had been joined as parties in the suit.
Shortly before adjourning the matter, Abdulhakeem Mustapha who represented Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara, prayed the court to make an order directing the federal government not to implement a deadline on the old notes.
Okoro obliged saying the order was binding pending when the substantive suit will be heard.
“The interim order is pending the hearing on the motion on notice,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) has said that President Muhammadu Buhari was not willing to call the CBN governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele to order concerning the naira redesign policy.
Spokesman for the group, Mr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmad, said in an interview on Channels Television, said Nigerians were “starving and angry” over the lingering scarcity of the naira notes.
Baba-Ahmed said the naira scarcity complicated matters for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) ahead of the February and March polls.
He said Buhari knows what to do if he does not want to see Nigerians suffer over the naira scarcity.
“We got here because President Buhari has messed up right to the point he is going to go.
“To have allowed this kind of fiasco to exist on the eve of an election when you are actually campaigning to have your own party voted for.
“This money thing is a major demarketing thing for the APC
“If the worst enemy of APC had designed a strategy for them to lose this election, he couldn’t have chosen a better strategy than this fiasco around the reprinting of the naira.
“People are starving, that is the honest truth. Literally, in three to four weeks, you have destroyed the informal sector of the economy. Because there is no cash. There is a lot of anger.
“You see a situation where the President appears unwilling or incapable of reining in Emefiele and say, ‘Listen, perhaps we can allow the old naira and the new naira co-exist for the next six months’.
“President Buhari apparently doesn’t listen to anybody. Emefiele said I will do what I should do because the president got my back.
“And Nigerians are saying we know the governor of the CBN is not the guy who is doing all these difficult things for us, it is the president.
“If the president doesn’t want all this suffering and considering the other options, the governor of the CBN won’t get away with these things he is getting away from,” he said.
