Using Money to Buy Money: The Morning Both Systems Went Quiet

Around early 2023, though it happened a year before when I was standing in front of the bank I used to use then, GTB, for a few hours under the hot scorching sun with no umbrella or shade to hide myself, just to get a chance to withdraw money that I owned legally, and all of a sudden, one of the security officers shouted numbers into a crowd that had stopped listening politely somewhere around hour two. This very day, there was an old woman standing beside me also planning to withdraw while I was also struggling to open my bank app, but the distraction from the queue would not allow me to do much because the inner me did not want to leave the old lady because a lot of people in the queue would not mind pushing her away to secure the next point in line.

All these was happening during the Naira redesign period, when we were told to return or change all the old notes into the new notes and the government was also busy stopping the old notes from going into circulation faster than the new ones could replace them, and at that moment in our lives, there was no cash available to people, even for those of us who had money in the bank, we were using money to buy money and that point in our life, most people don't usually collect transfer, they prefer cash. What nobody prepared us for was that digital didn't quietly step in to save the day either.

And those who were usually transferring apps, it got stuck at some point because a lot of people were busy relying on it to make transactions on them at once. Instead of us receiving alerts immediately, some days it takes hours or days before we see it, and that was one of the main reasons why a lot of people, including market women, always refuse to take transfers unless they see an immediate alert on their screen, because promises without proof had already burned too many people that month.

I could remember a lot of scenarios then, especially entering a mall and them complaining about their mobile app alert, and entering a bus and the conductor shouting that he cannot take transfer and that he accepts only cash because of the poor network, and those periods too, to give people change after buying us always hard, even if they pay with cash. At that moment, the entire system almost collapsed, and some people called it the cashless era.

But during this period, what I really gained was not even about cash or digital as competing ideas. But the idea of both systems cannot stand alone without infrastructure working perfectly at the same moment, and Nigeria has never once given me confidence that infrastructure holds steady when it matters most. So, if cash was taken away from us that moment, the fragility problem was not solved; it just showed us that one option still worked when everything electronic quietly refused to be stable.

And till today, I always keep a little amount of money somewhere in my purse. I have refused to touch it no matter what, but just in case anything like that happens again. That habit is not nostalgia. Personally, I just feel like what happened to me once when I saw an entirely country having money in the bank but no physical money at hand caused at exactly the same time.

Thank you for reading.

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