The pan Yoruba socio-political organization, Afenifere, has declared that the seven-day request made by President Muhammadu Buhari to resolve the problems associated with cash crunch in the country is too long.
Its National Publicity Secretary, Comrade Jare Ajayi, in a statement on Saturday, said that the 7 days’ request tends to suggest that President Buhari “does not appreciate the enormity and the intensity of the pains Nigerians are going through all in attempts to obtain cash from their accounts in banks across the country.”
It argued that several lives have been lost already just as social and economic activities have been seriously paralyzed. “For the nation to have to wait for another seven days is to say that the people can continue to go on suffering. That lives can continue to be lost and that businesses can continue to be crippled”.
President Buhari promised to take a decision ‘one way or the other’ within the seven days that the new deadline for the currency exchange remains.
According to his spokesman Garba Shehu, the president said this after his meeting with members of the Progressive Governors Forum at the State House last Friday. (The Forum consists of Governors from the States being controlled by the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC).
The governors had met the President to inform him of the excruciating pains Nigerians are going through in their attempts to withdraw money from the banks and exchange the outgoing Naira notes with new ones.
Thus, Afenifere urged the President to “act fast because lives and economies of Nigerians are seriously in danger as a result of the difficulties in getting cash and fuel.”
The organisation’s spokesman then said that the situation on ground presently “calls for urgent, well-thought-out and pro-people steps so as to quickly put an end to the avoidable sufferings of the people.”