By Eniola Adeyanju
Students of Kwara State University (KWASU), Malete, Ilorin, Kwara State, literally went through hell, following the cash crunch that trailed the Federal Government’s naira redesign policy.
Most of the students had to stay hungry for days and skip classes many times due to their inability to access cash to make essential purchases on campus.
The Federal Government had, in the build-up to the 2023 elections, redesigned three denominations of the nation’s currency- N200, N500, and N1,000- with effect from December 15, 2022, a move believed to have been aimed at preventing vote buying by politicians.
The government set January 31, 2023, as the initial deadline for the policy but shifted it to February 10, 2023, due to public outcry.
Meanwhile, three states- Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara- dragged the Federal Government to the Supreme Court, challenging the naira redesign policy.
The states, later joined by 12 others, obtained an interim order of the court which quashed the February 10 deadline and ruled that the three old denominations remained legal tender pending the determination of the substantive suit.
President Mohammodu Buhari, in a nationwide broadcast, however, varied the court order and allowed only N200 old notes to be recirculated, declaring N500 and N1,000 as having ceased to be legal tender.
As a result, the cash crunch persisted, foisting serious economic hardship on the populace.
In KWASU, as in most other tertiary institutions,
the students went through a harrowing experience, which largely disrupted their academic activities and exposed them to starvation and deprivations.
One of the students, who pleaded not to be quoted, recounted: “Many parents sent money to their children on campus but the measure could not help them as they could not translate the money into physical cash. Worse still, the POS agents on campus too could not help because they had no access to cash, while a few of the traders in the students’ hostels neighborhood, who were initially accepting bank transfers, suddenly refused to allow same.”
“Sometimes, I wasn’t able to attend classes because I had no new notes with me,” a student, who preferred to be quoted simply as Olamide, recalled.
She added: “Although I had old notes, the bike riders refused to accept them, neither would they accept bank transfer, especially after the expiration of the February 10 deadline.”
One of the students lamented that she missed her matriculation owing to the naira crisis.
She recounted: “I couldn’t attend my matriculation and it was most painful. I had to stay put in my hostel since I couldn’t access cash for the bike.
”I also couldn’t get essential purchases at the market because the traders refused to accept old notes or bank transfers. So, many times, I managed to eat only one meal a day.”
The students also suffered when they were asked to vacate the campus as a result of the election break granted them. Many of them were stranded on campus for days because they had no cash to travel. Worse still,most of the transporters did not accept bank transfers at the motor parks.
Parents who besieged the campus to transport their children home, however, came to the rescue of some of the students.
Some Lagos-bound students had to risk hitching a ride in trucks to get home. It was that bad.