 Welcome to the Advocate on Plus TV Africa, your reminder that important conversations are among the necessary tools for a Sena society. I will be talking about the reactions trailing the unveiling of the redesigned Naira Notes. Olua Shegu Elegbe De will be talking about the absence of Nigeria from Qatar 2022, a wake-up call to be more intentional about our football administration. Elijah Felix will be talking about political tawgri, a threat to democracy. Today, expect interesting and educational discussions will be right back after the break. Reaction trailing the unveiling of the redesigned Naira Notes. The central bank governor, Godwin Emefiele, issued a statement on the new policy to introduce redesigned Naira Notes. He stated this new development is due to a continuous rise in the inability of banks to control the circulation of the Naira and heightened cases in the production of counterfeit currencies. Other reasons behind this new policy is the increase in the shortage of bank notes and massive hoarding of Naira by members of the public. As elections are around the corner, there has been speculations that this could be politically motivated. However, the central bank of Nigeria has stated that the redesigned is viewed for economic development and applies to only the 200 Naira, 500 Naira and 1000 Naira Notes. The economic implication of the new Naira Notes is speculated to weaken monetary policies. Hopefully, if control is regained, it will curb the inflation rate and increase money in circulation. In the last two days, the foreign exchange market has reacted negatively to the unveiling of the redesigned Naira Notes. Mixed reactions from Nigerians expressed a disappointment at the unveiling, positing that the bank notes were not redesigned, rather a pure change of color. Considering Nigerians have a strong appetite for consumer items from the U.S. and the United Kingdom, which has resulted in every reliance on the importation of everything including food, food and commodity prices will likely be affected, costing inflation. Nigerians are hopeful that the redesigned notes will impact positively, increase growth and most importantly, reduce inflation. Elijah, what do you think about the renewal notes? Firstly, let me address the concern of Nigerians. There have been a lot of social media banter about these people making jests about that the central bank of notes just applies bleach. But let me tell you something. The physical fiat currency is what the CBN governor says it is. So there is nothing wrong in the CBN governor introducing that. They were expecting the complete overhaul in design. But it's okay, number one, it's cheaper to change the color, like you said, than to actually redesign it. Because I would believe that the central bank of Nigeria has a template to produce each currency. So if they are redesigning it per se, the whole appearance and maybe the length of the money or the texture, it's going to cost them more money because it means they have to change the templates. Exactly. But changing the color is to me some of the problems. They are trying to mope up money from the, they want to mope up money that's hidden. Some people are abusing this money. You see some people are starting huge funds. Money that's supposed to be in circulation is used for something. Someone will keep it in his backyard. This is money laundering, especially some people that have access to funds from public funds. You see what happens. They change only one dot on the currency and they say this is your new currency. It has been changed. They have the financing. So what matters more is that Nigerians should learn how to do cashless. They are trying to encourage cashless policies, you know, cashless transaction. They want to reduce the amount of 1500 naira notes in circulation so that there will be more security. It's easy for them to track spending and control. It's going to be difficult for people to learn that money, especially those in government. For instance, now if you go to countries like America, US, you can carry a certain number of pounds in your pockets. You have your master card, you have other forms of payment, security codes, they have different ones. There are some other electronic forms of transactions to each transaction. So keeping money in circulation. So I think it's a good idea. The reason why they think it's politically motivated is because some people consider the CBN Govno as being politically interested. Let me use that language. If you want to be a CBN Govno, you are not supposed to be a politically exposed person. But you know what happened the last time during the intention, post pre-primary year. So a CBN Govno being put out in public like that, oh, should run for president. It's actually against the ethics of the profession. So that is why some people have the opinion that I assure there is no political undertone. But listening to the CBN Govno himself, I think the intention and the motive are okay. That's on one hand. To drive reducing inflation and also to make the price of dollar fall in regard to Naira. It's not something that will happen overnight. It has to do more with production. We import more than we export. We export. If we export more, I think as well as we import necessary things we don't have. You import what you cannot produce and you export what you can produce and produce your food. I guess the macroeconomic fundamentals will allow the economy to be stable and will have a fair exchange rate. So designing the Naira alone will not solve the problem. But it's a good way of cobbing abuse of the and hoarding too. And make money easily in circulation, fluid and all those things. So who goes to them? Yes, I think that there was so much. Nigerians had expectations. We had expectations that okay, they want to redesign. That's the word. As a lawyer, you take note of words. If you are telling me, okay, we just want to do something else. But you said redesign. So people had expectations that okay, it's going to be a different person on the note. In fact, people made a lot of, on Twitter there were lots of lovely designs. Young people came up. Honestly, Nigerians are creative. Young people designed Naira notes and a lot of graphic artists on Twitter designed beautifully. I would comment them. I think the reason why the government did that is I just told you that they said they have a number of, specific number of Naira notes built that were supposed to be produced. That was pre the intention to redesign your notes in quotes. But because when they heard that the government want to redesign the notes, let's say they want to change some features like color and the rest, they actually use the same templates and went back to the same people that mentored it. As if meant the remaining number of notes, but change this feature like the color. But we are still spending money. No, it's cheaper that way. But we have money in Nigeria. No, it's cheaper that way to do what they did than actually redesigning it. I don't think an economy should be talking about cheaper because we have money in Nigeria. There is money in Nigeria. If they want to redesign, they can actually redesign. The Syrian government said it was cheaper that way and I saw the reasons because as I said, it's one template. Let me give you a scenario. It's just like if you are in a printing press and they ask you to print a certain number of newspaper, it has a color, it has a design, it's a written design on it. Now if they say, okay, print that same newspaper but change this change that, you are not going to change the length template. You are not going to change maybe one or two text the color. It's cheaper than going to reduce the length or increase the length and then looking for another template. That is what the government was trying to say. So they didn't really spend more than they should spend. That's what does the argument and they did it for security reasons. At least you have more money going to the bank and they can easily control and monitor spending and activities, fraudulent activities or other business activities to track spending and other things. And then I will zoom guess. Shayk, what do you have to say about this? Yeah, I've been listening to the two of you, your contributions there in order. I think, of course, explanations have to be managed. When the CBN government came out to say the NERA notes, the 200, 500 and 1,000 notes were going to be redesigned, I think Nigerians began to envision the kind of notes they were expecting. And so having to see that only colors were actually changed in those NERA notes. That's what resulted into the reactions that we have had in the last couple of, I mean, in the last hours that the notes were sent into the circulation. What should be more important and that should also be our area of concentration should be the reasons why the CBN has gone out to this. And they said the major reason is that more than 80% of the notes were not in the banks and they are out there in circulation. And with the pronouncement, you will see that people are trying to move money from here and there to ensure that they send them back into the banking system. I think that is one thing that we should commend the CBN for. If our notes are not in the banking system, it means also that many of the ransom has been paid via the cash medium. They are not paid back into the system. It gives the criminals the leeway to operate because they know there is so much cash in the circulation. And people also use the same cash to acquire alms and ammunitions. It is something that we should really commend beyond the colors that has been changed. What is really important here is that now we are going to have a situation where the notes will be back into the bank vaults. Now this is very instructive. Before now, as I'm not sure we have had any redesign of the Naira since the introduction of the cashier's policy. And we all know that nowadays there is a threshold of amount of money that you can draw out of your account from the bank individual and corporate accounts. So I think if everyone play by the rules, it will be very difficult for an individual or corporate entity to take so much out of the bank accounts and keep somewhere. And more importantly that the elections are here, we also know that both buying is a major factor, a determining factor in our elections. If there are no cash to send, I mean people don't, if you want to pay bribe, even at the police station where they take bribe, they will ask you not to use your account, they want cash. And if it is difficult for people to access cash, of course you have your money, your account, let me do transfer to you. It is going to call up some accesses in some ways. So I think this is recommended. We are not, the gain is not that we want to see the best of designs. It is still legal tender. I mean it is still a currency, we will spend it, we will use it to exchange for goods and services. And that is the most important thing that has to come into play here. Thank you. Thank you very much Mr. Ole Shegun. Ole Shegun elag bede is next after the break.