A Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Mike Ozekhome, has clarified that the Supreme Court of Nigeria only paused the new naira note policy. Ozekhome who appeared on Channels Television on Wednesday night in an interview monitored by The News Chronicle noted that the apex court will still have to decide on the matter.
It would be recalled that a seven-man panel of the Supreme Court on Wednesday, led by Justice John Okoro in a unanimous ruling granted an interim injunction restraining the Federal Government from implementing the CBN’s February 10 deadline for the swapping of the old naira notes with the new ones.
This was a result of an ex-parte motion filed by AbdulHakeem Mustapha (SAN) on behalf of the government of Kaduna, Kogi and Zamfara states.
While speaking on the matter, Ozekhome said, “The Supreme Court has not decided the matter. All it has done is to fall back to a decision like Kotoye vs CBN, that in matters of extreme urgency, you can grant an interim order, even if it be an ex-parte, to prevent the subject matter of the suit being truncated”.
Making an analogy, the legal luminary said “It is another way of saying, ‘Let us first drive away the fox before we blame the fowl for wandering too far into the forest.”
The News Chronicle earlier reported that the CBN had set the deadline for the submission of old naira notes to February 10, 2023, after it was shifted from 31 January 2023.
Justifying the necessity of the new currency policy, the CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele stated in October 2022 that the action was taken in order to take control of the currency in circulation.
Emefiele disclosed that available data at the CBN shows that N2.7 trillion out of the N3.3 trillion currency in circulation was outside the vault of commercial. Other reasons given by the CBN boss include counterfeiting and terrorism.
