Following the new Naira policy and the stringent deadline by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Supreme Court of Nigeria on Wednesday has thereby restrained CBN from implementing the February 10, 2023 deadline for the old 200, 500 and 1000 Naira notes to stop being legal tenders.

This is coming after three northern states, Kaduna, Kogi and Zamfara who had in a motion ex-parte filed on February 3rd, 2023, by their lawyer, AbdulHakeem Mustapha (SAN), prayed the apex court to halt the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Naira redesign policy.

The state governments said they are worried about the effects the CBN naira redesign policy is having on the residents of their states.

Mustapha said, “Unless this Honourable Court intervenes, the Government and people of Kaduna, Kogi and Zamfara State will continue to go through a lot of hardship and will ultimately suffer great loss as a result of the insufficient and unreasonable time within which the Federal Government is embarking on the ongoing currency redesign policy.”

The states said there had been a shortage in the supply of the new naira notes in Kaduna, Kogi and Zamfara States and that citizens who have dutifully deposited their old naira notes have increasingly found it difficult and sometimes next to impossible to access new Naira notes to go about their daily activities.

The states further said that the CBN policy is imposing a lot of hardship on Nigerians and insisted that the ten days dateline extension by the Federal Government is still insufficient to address the challenges of Nigerians swapping their old Naira notes for new ones.

The News Agency of Nigeria reported that a seven-man panel of the Supreme Court led by Justice John Okoro, in a unanimous ruling, granted an interim injunction restraining the Federal Government (FG), CBN, and commercial banks, from implementing the February 10, deadline for the old 200, 500 and 1000 Naira notes to stop being a legal tender.

The court further held that the FG, CBN, and commercial banks must not continue with the deadline pending the determination of a notice in respect of the issue on February 15, 2023.

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