Old Queues, New Queuers, and the Naira Queries
The average Nigerian will find herself/himself in one or more of three queues this weekend.
This January, the first month of the last year of Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency, the people find themselves in 3 separate but simultaneous existential queues.
The old queue, the perennial one, is the long wait for people to buy petrol in filling stations.
There are anti-queue quickies, though, at the end of every mile – guys who offer fuel in jerricans without delay for those who can pay between N350 and N450 per litre. The new queue, the present one, is the lost hours of viable women and men who want to receive their Permanent Voters Card (PVC) for the February 25, 2023 general elections. The deadline for collection is tomorrow, January 29, 2023.
There’s great enthusiasm to vote this time, especially among the young and middle-aged, who together represent over 92% of the 9.5 million newly registered voters.
The Naira queue, the perplexing one, is the one forced on people who are neither ready to queue for fuel nor ready to queue for PVCs. They are forced to deposit all the 3 highest denominations of the old currencies in their possession in the bank in 2 days’ time, January 30, 2023.
According to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the N200, N500, and N1000 notes cease to be legal tender by January 31, 2023.
This measure is the high point of the CBN’s demonetisation policy in the bid to retrieve cash stored out of bank vaults towards achieving the cashless economy policy. But there are complaints about the little time (3 months) given and the scarcity of the new notes, among other concerns.
There are several reports that those ready to deposit the old currencies do not have the new notes to spend. Thus, there are 2 sub-queues here: the queue to get new notes to spend and the queue to deposit the old notes.
Old Queues: A Timeline of Fuel Queues
Many reasons have been given for incessant queues at filling stations to get fuel, especially petrol. And as many complaints as to the waste of man hours, when people are forced to mortgage the productive hours of their day for affordable fuel at the filling stations.
Below is a timeline of incoherent reasons for fuel scarcity in Nigeria in the last 4 months.
New Queuers – Young people’s quest for their PVC
Many of those in these queues at various INEC offices are between the ages of 18 and 35. Some are newly conceived voters who have just reached the voting age of 18. The majority are newly converted voters who just realised they had options beyond the traditional binary party options between APC and PDP. The thoughts of viable candidates from other parties, especially the Labour Party and the NNPP have resulted in late subscribers for the voting tool – the PVC.
Interestingly, the youngest group of voters, aged between 18 and 35 years made up 76.56 per cent of the 9.5 million newly registered voters between June 28th 2021 and July 31st 2022.