Cashless Nigeria, an idea of immeasurable beauty?, By Uddin Ifeanyi

The signs are not good. Early morning queues at bank branches when customers scurry to secure access to deposits never made sense. Especially, when during the day the crowd disperses without customers having access to the cash they need for their quotidian needs. The hype of the cashless economy is just that. The infrastructure of the domestic financial services industry has not invested enough in the equipment and processes needed to end the conversation in a zero-cash environment. This explains the epidemic of dispensing errors. Not long ago, you could see this flipped in a day. Never. Now they hang like mythical wraiths of slain victims — miserably hoping for some sort of closure.

Can the economy make up for lost labor time over the past three months? Whether at the supermarket checkout counter, or at the filling station — five to 10 minutes are now added to each transaction just to complete the payment. And do people have to go through this horrible process? Our new problem, unfortunately, is not exhausted by possible answers to these questions. For negative auguries do not end here. A leisurely stroll through many neighborhoods reveals that the local economy is in decline. The corner shop “aboki” is now a disjointed chat room rather than the thriving marketplace it once was. The middle-aged woman with the stall at the estate gate no longer came — his roasted plantains and peanuts go back to local folklore. I saw “vulcaniser” by the last main intersection, two weeks ago. He doesn’t have a bank account, so he can’t accept transfers. His customers had run out of money years ago, so it was only a matter of time before he ran into trouble improving his credit. The moms’ market on the pedestrian sidewalks now offers thin salvers — they don’t “change”, the client doesn’t have cash.

And then there’s the more troubling anecdote. Hospital deaths are caused by families and families not being able to raise money to buy medicine for hospitalized family members, or to pay for medical procedures. Pensioners who suffer, get sick or die because they don’t have access to money in their bank accounts. The petit bourgeois in the city with the old people living alone is the biggest problem of our time. Suddenly grandparents can no longer afford to pay someone to take care of them and help them come to work. A few weeks ago, he was still able to buy cash (this particular experience is the most important contribution of the Buhari government to the economy) to get fuel for the generator. But even the most imaginative point-of-sale (PoS) terminal operators are starting to run out of stock-in-trade. And of course without a generator in use these old pensioners have no access to a water pump.

If there was an image of the word “existential crisis”, the situation in Nigeria today would be it! Now, this raises a lot of questions. But the most obvious of these questions, if not the most fundamental, is about how policies are made and why it is now clear that the ideas in people’s heads matter only in terms of their results. How important it is that, when implemented, the results have a beneficial or negative impact. If so, the corollary question is how did we arrive at the set of policies that led to this crisis? Obviously, the higher threat to the economy that we see today is the result of combining the internal, hermetic beauty of an idea with the certainty of the same idea as it does in the imagination when the rubber meets the tarmac.

There is room in the febrile Nigerian mind to celebrate a bodyblow to the street trade of money exchange. But like the other idea that reforming our political system can be achieved by accelerating the economy before the general election, the benefits of this policy goal may be pyrrhic. It is better to design policies on the back of a thorough understanding of the economy. With data-driven policies, unintended consequences still arise. In whimssy, meddling in the economy will be as effective as shooting in the stygian darkness.

At the end of this season, we can all agree that in the history of this country we have suffered a lot (besides the civil war) from the misguided actions of the few.

Uddin Ifeanyi, a manqué journalist and retired civil servant, can be contacted @IfeanyiUddin.