By Kamil Opeyemi & Molade Durojaiye
Bank officials are now endangered across the country as the crisis over availability of cash worsened by the end of the week.
NPO Reports visited some banks on Friday and observed that many officials working at the counters especially are worried about their personal safety with the surges in crowds of frustrated customers.
At one of the Zenith Bank branches located on Oba Akran, Ikeja, two staff of the bank who spoke to the NPO Reports on condition of anonymity expressed apprehensions over the state of minds of majority of the customers who come and go away frustrated.
“We have very limited time to sort this mess, otherwise, next week may be something else,” one of them volunteered Friday afternoon.
She gave an instance of a woman who said she has a patient on an emergency at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital and was asked to buy drugs and the pharmacy said their POS was not working.
“She came here begging and crying for help. She knelt pleading for help. It was one of our bosses who gave her N3,000 cash at least for her to leave the premises,” she narrated.
Her colleague, who said he has been worried over the entire cash crunch, said it may be necessary for banks with no cash to dispense at all to shut down by next week instead of attracting customers who would grow angry and attack staff and damage facilities.
He said, “It won’t be good we continue to open if this situation persists till next week. We are simply not been given cash by the CBN and that is the genesis of the matter.”
By Friday, a branch of the Wema Bank in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital was damaged after irate customers got no good response from the officials.
Already, Nigerians are being treated to various cases of actions from stripping naked to violent fights among customers.
A viral video of two customers who resorted to physical attacks within a branch of one of the banks showed the extent of the confusion being witnessed by the banks.
In another similar case, a video has shown scores of bank customers struggling fiercely at an automated teller machine.
On Friday, another video went viral of a man inside a banking hall who stripped himself naked and threatened to do anything to bank workers.
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In the same vein, a customer, who claimed to be a building contractor created a scene inside a First Bank branch in Lagos after he said that artisans working on site for him needed to be paid and he must get about N500,000 to pay his workers.
By this weekend, temper is still rising.
The violence that disrupted activities in Ibadan on Friday was believed to be a signpost of what would come as from Monday should the situation persist.
As it is, there are no signs that the situation will abate by Monday.
The outcome of the meeting of some All Progressive Congress Governors with President Muhammadu Buhari has not done much to reassure Nigerians that the situation will come under control soon.
The president had given a seven day promise to end the complications ignoring the proposal by the governor to allow both the old and the new Naira notes to co-exist while allowing for a gradual phasing out of the old ones.
In his personal message to Nigerians, the president had said on Friday he is “aware of the cash shortages and hardship being faced by people and businesses, on account of the Naira redesign.
“I want to assure that we are doing everything to resolve these issues. Nigerians should expect significant improvements between now and the February 10 deadline.”