Sanusi, please consider N5,000 coins

Sanusi, please consider N5,000 coins

After reading all the arguments marshalled out by the Central Bank as to why it is important we have the N5,000 denomination, I have become convinced that we actually need it. So, let the CBN and its agents stop this charade of sponsored supporters of the new denomination.
It makes one want to puke. Similarly, let the lawmakers stop this grandstanding and blowing of hot air about how they are determined to stop it – because we know they won’t. Meanwhile, those organising protests against the new notes should also find another job. Out-of-office politicians and other quasi rights activists should not just lurk in ambush in anticipation of some seemingly unpopular government policy to re-launch themselves into relevance by riding on the backs of other gullible, but equally jobless, Nigerians.
People should just stop fouling up the air and raising unnecessary dust in the polity – so that we can clearly see when the politicians, and their counterparts in the civil service, are genuinely taking us for a ride. Like I said earlier, I’m now an apostle of the new Sanusi denomination and I will take the gospel of the N5,000 denomination to every corner of the earth. I will preach it in Kano, Suleja, Maidugri, Isuochi, Otuoke, Lagos, Abuja and all. “Repent, all ye doubting Thomases, for the salvation of the Naira and our economy has come!!” I, Apostle Steve (an inheritor of the goodwill of Stephen the Martyr), have seen the light.
I now know that we need N5,000 note if we sincerely want to address the Boko Haram menace. For how can we hope to revive the textile mills and factories of Kaduna and Kano without this gbogbonise denomination? How can any sensible person talk of checking the rising wave of armed robbery, rape, suicide and road accidents in Nigeria without the cure-all N5,000 note?.
Sure, N5,000 note is also important if we are ever to fix our bad roads, halt election rigging, stop the endless strike by NUPENG and PENGASSAN, curtail the excesses of the subsidy cabal, provide more funds for the education and health sectors so that ASUU, NMA, CONMESS and all the other ‘messes’ that dog our public service can become things of the past. And, lest we forget, we also need Sanusi’s N5,000 notes to fix the problem in the aviation industry, where our otherwise flying coffins have suddenly lost their ability to fly – and started dropping off the sky like dry leaves from trees. Yes, we will need N5,000 notes to drive the cassava bread project.
Most of all, we also need the new notes to strengthen our anti-graft war. Most of all, however, we also need the N5,000 note to finally phase out the culture of Ghana-Must-Go bags. With Ghanaians, flushing out Nigerians from their country, we too do not only want to chase away the Ghanaians in our midst, we actually want to uproot every vestige of the Ghanaians’ misadventure into Nigeria by also discontinuing the use of the Nigerian-made bags, which we have, over the years, come to know as Ghana-Must-Go bags. Our CBN governor, a first class graduate, knows the people, who use the bags the most (or who gave it its notoriety) are right there in government quarters.
So, he has hatched up an idea to eliminate their need for the bags: a higher, more encompassing denomination. With the new N5,000 note, a usual note wrap of 100 pieces would instantly translate into half a million naira. The five-wrap bundle alone, which any normal person can conveniently stuff away in his trouser pockets, would come to N2.5 million. You can then imagine how much a lawmaker can conveniently stuff into his Shagari cap alone.
If you then place this against the fact that the Shagari caps always complement an agbada (babanriga), which is in itself, a collection of exaggerated pockets, you can then imagine how much an Agbada-clad politician would be carrying on his person. Furniture allowance, housing allowance, ‘spare tyre’ from the purchase of official cars, vote for constituency projects and even severance allowance can all be carried on one moving politician – and it would not even show that he’s carrying anything extraordinary.
I think our politicians would then become bullion vans on two legs. The reverse side of it all would then be that instead of armed robbers now hijacking bullion vans and battling to open the safe inside (after engaging in suicidal gun-battle with security operatives), they would just look out for any agbada-wearing politician, turn him upside-down to empty his pocket and smile to the bar (sorry, bank).
However, those of us on the popular side (opposed to the introduction of the new note) have been debating over this N5,000 note palaver and how to make the best of it, knowing that it is already a lost battle. We have since come up with a brilliant solution that would not only save our economy, but also save our politicians: Let the CBN make the N5,000 in coins!!! Since the proponents have sworn that the new note is not our leaders’ way of stealing more while carrying less, it then means that they would not mind if the new denomination is in coins.
Now with my recollection of O/Level Economics, O.A Lawal, Adekunle Aromolaran, O. Teriba and even Aboyade, I can’t recollect them saying that paper money has more value than their coin equivalents. So, whatever sophisticated international trade and foreign reserve and other technical reason the Naira do-gooders are advancing for this new regime can still be adequately achieved. I have never travelled to America, so I am not going to tell any stories of how $1,000 note is the highest denomination of the United States or how it is hardly ever seen in circulation. I never went to Mobutu’s Zaire nor have I ever gone to Zimbabwe – to tell how they sometimes need a bagful of Zimbabwean Dollars to buy a loaf of bread or whether this is as a result of inflation or senseless printing of higher and higher denominations.
All I have is this native intelligence (although I don’t know if I still have, after the July gunshot to my head – whether the bullet wound has not affected my reasoning), which tells me that whatever we want to achieve with notes, we can also achieve with coins. Moreover, there is also a host of other advantages to the N5,000 coin Considering all the security details that go into the notes, would it not be cheaper to just mint coins?
After all, we don’t have to cast it with 24 carat gold or diamond just because it’s N5,000. We could even borrow a leaf from the organisers of the last London Olympics: the metals with which they made the gold, silver and bronze medals were hardly worth the price of wood but that did not take anything away from the medals. Or their value. Finally, since our politicians not only like carrying a lot of money with them but also live dangerously, I think large quantities of N5,000 coins in their pockets (especially in the breast pockets (close to the heart) and in the agbada pockets (close to the intestines and lungs)) could help deflect bullets in a way that no note would ever do – even if it is a N10,000 note.
But, most of all, N5,000 coin would effectively address the suspicions of we the masses that public officials are not planning (with this their N5,000 note) to put all our money in their back pockets and stroll out of government house as if they are not carrying anything. And before we realise what hit us, they have reached the Chadian border enroute Sahara Desert and Europe. So, Oga Sanusi, we are not opposed to your introducing the N5,000 denomination. We just wish you could bring it in coins. We have looked all over the world and found out that everyone else is using their coins with pride, except Nigerians. We are now ‘proudly Nigerian’.
We now want to grow this culture of using coins. In fact, we are already feeling very nostalgic about our N1 and N2 coins, which were sent to their early graves as soon as they were ‘downgraded’ to coins. Don’t downgrade the denominations that are already in existence. Just bring the new one (N5,000) in coins and, I assure you, we’ll use it.