By Patrick Dele Cole
The principal reason for the heedless pursuit of a cashless society is
the belief that this will stop corruption. This is a Western notion which we
have embraced fully – bringing lots of jobs to the West – the computers, the
dispensing machines, the chips, pin, cards, etc. In the process it has changed
banking beyond recognition. The bankers no longer want to see their clients:
Their attitude is this: bring your money to the bank, but speak to the ATM. The
rationale is fundamentally flawed in a developing economy.
The system – cashless –
is presaged by an assumption that all of us have computer related devices –
i.e. phones; that we are literate, that the ATMs work, that there is
electricity and that ATMs are available nation wide.
If you live in the cities, you may be able to do all of this; ( in
Europe and US they even have receiving ATMs where the traders can actually
deposit end of day sales, thus we have the beginning of making high street
Banks irrelevant and unnecessary.) Bottom line is to reduce cost of banking and
increase profit for bank owners.
The question we should ask our Western minders is this: was corruption
eradicated or reduced in their countries because their society was
cashless? In Nigeria
the outcome necessarily is mixed. In my village we have one bank, one ATM, no
light therefore most of the time the ATM is not working. The traditional local
bank manager is an encyclopedia of local custom, he knows who is coming up in
society so that when CBN, for example, intervenes in agriculture the bank
manager is able to interpret that intervention to potential clients who stand
to benefit.
Such intervention in small scale agriculture may be the saving grace of Nigeria. But
our suited CBN bureaucrats obviously have not created the agricultural
intervention for the farmers but for a class of fast thinking, fast talking
computer literate manipulators, who know how to fill the CBN forms without
leaving Lagos, Ibadan,
Kaduna, Kano,
Maiduguri etc. These city sleek operators are the beneficiaries of nearly all
CBN interventions whether for agriculture or transport etc.
