My name is Olugbenga (Gbenga for short) Arenola, and I run a roofing sheets business in Abuja. My business has grown from infancy over the course of eight years now, and presently, when I take on a deal from a client, I exude that assurance – from my demeanour, confidence, poise, dressing, and portfolio – that tells my client that if they left me to find another, they either would not find one good enough, or it would cost them time to find one. In these past eight years, I have not performed any magic to get me where I am today. I simply had progressively added foreign business partners and associates into my product delivery and service rendering chain, and before long, I became known for being that roofing sheet and accessories provider that gives clients the best material at the most competitive price.

I now have local and foreign partners who I bring business to, and who bring business to me. We work together nearly every day, taking on all those same hassles you know traders take on and somehow making it work– flaky clients, unwilling distributors, untrusting international raw material producers, customs delays and surcharges, currency conversion drama, international payments processing bottlenecks, local payments processing ledger balancing, the whole nine yards. We do not have a 100% percent success rate, but situations like what happened six days ago are what give me assurance that our small cross-border community of business partners understand our assignment. We have come to stay.

My phone rang, I picked up, and by the end of the conversation, I had begun the process of supplying 200 yards of bitumen roofing sheets and 200 yards of black corrugated roofing sheets for heat absorption to a client in Kano the very next day– the biggest bulk deal I had ever gotten since I began this business. It was already 12 noon when the call came in. The client would need to begin using the materials two days later. I had become so trustworthy in delivering that I was the only one he could call to get this done. The money was good for it, and so I hopped on it; schedules for the next 36 hours completely changed at the spot, and my brain began calculating. There was a lot to navigate, and the worst issues I face with urgent deals like this is unavailability of suppliers and, when international, payment and currency conversion bottlenecks. These would not get the best of me in this instance, I assured myself, buckled my belt, and, starting from home, I began placing calls.

I rang Kabir in Kano first. The strategy was to start with trusted suppliers closest to the client. Eight years ago, when I started, Kabir was there. He was still an apprentice to an Igbo ceiling tiles dealer in Lokogoma, Abuja back then. He began his own outfit three years ago. Proximity to me has made his start so much less tenuously as most startups. I knew his capabilities. I doubted he would have what I was looking for. But these young ones can pull a good surprise, you know. I was half-right. He could get the goods, but he would have to import the next four days, as his stock had finished a week ago. He did not have pricey clients who needed that quality of material all the time, so he did not restock quickly, and his international supplier always takes four days to begin and complete transactions like this due to payment hurdles. Kabir’s angle was a bust. I expanded my search.

I reached Nneka in Lagos. Nneka was one of those females who knew exactly how to prove that women can thrive in this building materials production and supply industry without lifting a finger. She says it should not be a big deal that women know these things in the 21st Century. That it should be a norm. That boldness and raw bite is what has kept her in the game, and boy, this game she did know how to play. Nneka’s angle did not completely pull through when I called because of one thing and one thing alone: She did not have up to 200 yards of both materials. She could offer me 80 yards of the bitumen and 150 yards of the black corrugated. I took it. Simply meant I had to split the supply direction in two. It was at this point I had to think international and call Tunji.
Tunji Ige had been in this business 10 years before I began. He had leg. He grew up in Ghana, despite being Nigerian, and established his headquarters there, with branches in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, the UK, Turkey and Malaysia. Tunji is a big boy. Tunji is also my guy. But I avoid Tunji at times because his prices could be scary, even if I was the one calling. Business is business, they say. I risked Tunji this time because I was sure he would have what I was looking for and there was no time or luxury to scout for alternatives. He indeed had what I was looking for, no surprises there. He had the materials in his UK office though. He would be able to provide the supply on time from the UK. I just had to pay private shipping fees that also covers customs clearance, added to the cost of materials and haulage.

Here comes why I have been telling this story: the payments made and the revelation Tunji gave to me after I processed his payment. Tunji is also somewhat of a financial enthusiast, so, after I sent money to him through the International Money Transfer Operator (IMTO) I have an account with and he promised to ensure the money cleared in the morning of the next day before he began processing, he changed the discussion topic from our business to eNaira.

He told me the Nigerian CBN was planning to launch the eNaira on October 1 as its own Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), told me that he had been wanting something like that, some better alternative to cryptocurrency (as crypto had truly dealt with him in the past), and told me how eNaira has been promised to make transactions faster, safer, easier, and cheaper. He said a lot about eNaira, I began to wonder if he was the one who gave the CBN the idea to create it. Among all he said, I picked out a few things I took to heart, swore to not forget, promised myself to preach the gospel of and write articles about (like this one), and decided to try out once the eNaira launches. Those things bordered around the business that I do.

First thing I noted was the statistics Tunji gave me on how much havoc cryptocurrency international transfers have wreaked on businesses because of the volatile price fluctuations and the risky unknown transaction mediators who have more often than not disappeared from the scene the moment they found a “maga” and “hammered”. Tunji said that, on a monthly basis, popular cryptocurrencies can gain or lose 50% of its value. Someone who traded in bitcoin in 2017 and relied on bitcoin for trading today would incur 1200% more risk than he or she did in 2017. Over 76.5% recorded Nigerian businesses trading with cryptocurrency through exchanges have not had positive turnover in their balance sheets. They are all still pushing and waiting for when it would happen, but it does not seem to want to. After the phone call, I did my own research to verify Tunji’s numbers and they all checked out. But I did not trade in crypto; He did, at certain points, and regretted it. I have always relied on fiat money. Then Tunji told me that while fiat money is known, reliable, and fairly steady, the eNaira offers so much better for Nigerians.

With eNaira, I could buy any amount of goods I wished to buy from him without worrying about whether or not the IMTO I use is the same as his, or has affiliation with his, or is linked to his bank, or if his IMTO is linked to my bank. I would simply enter amount, and send straight to his wallet, and he receives it in the Cedi equivalent instantly. The processes between my sending and his receiving was no longer my worry and would happen nearly-instantaneously. Even as I had just made purchase for goods in the UK, the reality of eNaira would be that I simply send and the Pounds Sterling equivalent pops up at his UK office, and they process the payment immediately. I would not have to wait till morning as I was doing then any longer. Even with local trade, when I go to the market, there would be no need to start finding fifty Naira “change” or a hundred Naira “change”. It is pay, receive, and then you’re on your way. It sounded incredible. That was the moment I made up my mind to become the volunteer eNaira ambassador I am today.
What I pray for now is that eNaira comes through with its promises, because if it does, it would truly be a game changer. Roping Nneka and Kabir into the eNaira train would not be something I would regret, if eNaira comes correct. My plan to introduce this my wealthy client in Kano to eNaira after October 1 would be a good move if it comes correct too.

Oh, and, the supply went well. We nearly missed my client’s deadline, but we could make it. I suppose though, with eNaira, we would not be so close to missing the deadline as we were with this.

> Olugbenga Fakoredele Arenola is a business man, supplying bespoke roofing sheets for all house needs. He has been in business for eight years now, and in that time with good progress, he has become a known voice in the industry, especially in Abuja where his business is domiciled.

Local And International Trade: How The eNaira Can Cause Positive Shifts

Type in “New Normal” into your search engine as a query and you would be greeted with more than 2.2 billion search results in a fraction of a second. Specifically, 0.70 second. Like many words and phrases which became popular with the fast spread of the Corona Virus, the expression “New Normal” is not going away anytime soon.  But what is the new normal all about? Is there really a new normal? What are the things that smell of novelty but still quickly take on the cloak of normalcy? Well, I had all these questions until I settled in to a bit of research.

The term “New Normal” was coined to represent the lifestyle changes especially such as is obtainable in the social hemisphere of life around the world since the discovery and spread of the COVID-19 virus. From wearing of masks in public places, stretching all the way to increase in electronic purchases and cashless transactions, the term ‘new normal’ collectively umbrellas all of them. So, when the doorman points you to the “No Masks, No Entry” sign on the door of your favourite eatery and says something like, “Sir, it seems you have not become accustomed to the new normal?” He is referring to the social and behavioural changes necessitated by the Corona Virus pandemic.

Although everyone says it is the ‘new normal’, I beg to differ. I believe it is more appropriate to refer to THE POST-COVID-19 era as the ‘eNormal’ i.e.  the electronic Normal. From businesses to schools and even religious houses finding electronic options to float their activities through digital platforms, the pandemic opened everyone to a world of possibilities. We all became a lot more receptive to electronic options because in some cases, there was no other way or in other cases, it became the safer option to get things done without putting our immediate family members at risk of contracting the deadly virus. So, we went from boardroom meetings to Zoom sessions, and school lessons had to fit into Google Classrooms, and online shopping replaced going to the malls.
It is over a year since the lockdown days were over. Slowly but surely, life is coming back to its former tempo. Inter-state travels are now embarked on without restrictions, the COVID-19-influenced curfews have all become history and with the necessary precautions, social events are now holding across the country. So, despite the fact that you still have to wear a mask to access various public facilities, we can say post COVID-19 era is here and the curfews might go but not the dependence on electronic options to payments, they are here to stay. While many believe that this was caused by the pandemic, I do not think that is entirely true. The technologies we began to rely heavily on during the pandemic are not new. They were with us long before the pandemic. 
These technologies beckoned on every one of us, but we were really stuck in our old ways. That is why I am of the opinion that COVID-19 is not quite the causative agent of the eNormal, the pandemic was simply an enabler.

For some years now, e-Technologies have called for a cash-less approach to financial transactions but for some reason we decided to stick with the old-fashioned way. With the introduction of Cash-less Policy, as far back as 2012 by the Central Bank of Nigeria, one would think that cash-less payments would be embraced long before the pandemic hit us. But it was not until 2020 when the lockdown kept everyone indoors and businesses had to go digital that electronic payments got attention. In fact, before the pandemic, there were business owners who were very reluctant about cashless payments, there were even a crop of others, complete laggards, who did not accept digital payments at all for the fear of “fake” alerts and other fraudulent moves by dubious customers.

Howbeit, COVID-19 came and everyone had to find a way to stay afloat. Flashback to the lockdown and see how fast we moved from cash to digital and then to electronic payments. The evolution is here to stay; hence, it is not a question of ‘if’ but a question of ‘when’ which I do believe is in no distant time. In the dynamic world of business and trade, the way forward is CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies). At the moment, about 81 countries are in the process of launching their respective national digital currencies. In fact, 11 countries such as the Bahamas, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and others have fully launched their own digital currencies. There is a trail of other countries, trying to catch up and not be left out because of the prospects it holds for citizens resident in the country or in the Diaspora.

For Ghana, their own digital currency is called eCedis, in the Bahamas, it is called the Bahamian Sand Dollar and in Nigeria, the CBN issued Digital Currency called the eNaira. Believe it or not, digital currencies are the future of financial transactions, the earlier we adopt and make peace with it, the better for us as Nigerians.
So, let me welcome you to the eNormal, a place where we won’t just experience the advantage of the eCurrencies, but a place where more can actually happen for you, and for your business.

> Aregbese Olawale is a health worker, social media commentator on all things Social Health Development, and a father of two. Aregbese lives in Lagos, the ground zero for COVID-19 in Nigeria, and since being directly involved in setting up testing centres and getting vaccination kits, has decided to occasionally let his voice on the realities affecting COVID-19 interventions known from Lagos to the rest of the world.

eNaira In A Post-COVID-19 Nigeria: Fitting Into The eNormal

CACOVID. Feed the Future. Ebola Fund Watch. These are a few words Nigerians have been hearing in the news in recent times. They refer to government relief initiatives meant to alleviate the effect of COVID-19, improve the agricultural value chain in Nigeria, and alleviate the effects of Ebola on victims, respectively. These funds are (and were) all directed to individuals and businesses who needed a way to stay afloat during the crisis times that prompted them, or to businesses who have been seeking ways to become meaningful contributors to the immediate economies around them but have no financial resources to make this happen.

There is a trove of social welfare schemes being deployed now and again all over Nigeria, from the Federal level, to the State level, to the Local Government level, and as history would have it, for every one of these welfare relief schemes, there have been eyes, ears, and mouths geared at the ready, looking on and observing, recording successes and failures, reporting them, and creating narratives.
It is to be expected, really, that there should be such surgical introspection to these welfare programmes, as Nigeria, by very design, is riddled with a multiplicity of “what of mine?” traps – huge ethnic diversity, huge language diversity, stark religious diversity, obvious diversities in social strata. And to cap it all off is the fact that Nigeria is seen and quoted as the Giant of Africa. Nigeria is looked upon to lead in Africa. The resultant effect, for nine cases out of ten, is resistance. 

The benignity of welfare programmes is resisted by fast-building narratives. The transparency of welfare programmes is resisted by quick-spreading narratives. The capability of these welfare programmes to achieve its objectives is resisted by quick-cementing narratives. It leaves the Nigerian government in an apparent lose-lose situation with controlling the narratives, and thus, the involved MDAs resort to acting with very little care for speaking, or speaking correct.

There has been word-of-mouth credence to some of the evidences of foul-play presented by these watchful eyes. Many-a-Nigerian households will give testimonies that bear witness to marginalization, inequitable distributions, moral soilage of qualification systems to receive funds, non-transparency of processes. These vocal evidences, while not nearly sufficient enough, are usually backed by publicly available statistics when pundits take on the matter and publish on their blogs and pages and channels. They would cite some of these instances:
The case of the Economic Stimulus Bill of 2020, where the proposed law aimed to provide 50% tax rebates to businesses that are registered under the Companies and Allied Matters Act so they can use this saving to continue employing their current workers. However, while the bill focused on providing relief to formal sector businesses, 65% of Nigeria’s total GDP comes from the informal sector, which also employs more than 90% of the Nigerian workforce, and these workers needed support to survive. Many businesses in the informal sector are unregistered so it was difficult for them to get these benefits. There was a microfinance solution created for these businesses resultant from this, but even that too, faced its execution hurdles, and formed negative narratives too.
The CBN’s N50 billion Targeted Credit Facility (TCF) stimulus package offered a credit of N3 million Naira to poor families impacted by COVID-19. However, the loan required collateral and was not interest-free. The people clamoured for a situation where the loans were made available free of collateral to poor households or just required signed guarantees by community leaders. They also clamoured for a situation where the loans were made available at a low interest rate with long moratorium and repayment period. There was also the obstacle of awareness: not many poor households and businesses in the informal sector knew about the available economic packages and policies implemented by the government on COVID-19, and so not many applied.

A month later, on April 1, 2020, the Nigerian government announced that it would make transfers of N20,000 ($52 as at then) to poor and vulnerable households registered in the National Social Register (NSR). As at August of 2020, the NSR had only 2.6 million households (about 11 million people) registered on its platform. However, 87 million Nigerians (8 times the households indexed by the NSR) live on less than $1.90 a day. Only 1/8 of poor households would have gotten that alleviation, and the ones who got would feel its effects, at the same living standard, for only 26 days, less than a month.

And these are the realities of COVID-19, which is most recent, and so far, recorded as the most organized federal government relief fund scheme executed in recent times. Pundits and bloggers and influencers ate these statistics up, and created hyperbolic narratives that only drive to discourage Nigerians from believing in and participating in government relief schemes in the future.
The revamped Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development (FMHDS), today, is in charge of social schemes like GEEP (Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programmes), running sub programmes like TraderMoni, MarketMoni, and FarmerMoni; schemes like the N-Power programme designed for skill-acquisition for young Nigerians; schemes like CCT (Conditional Cash Transfer) which prioritizes social protection interventions as a key strategy towards reducing poverty and socio-economic vulnerabilities in the population; and schemes like NHGSFP (Nigeria Home Grown School Feeding Programme) aimed at providing cost-effective home grown school feeding for Nigerian students and pupils. Managing these programmes require the most dutiful attention to equitability, transparency, documentation, moral uprightness for pre-qualification and qualification processes, and social diversities of the country.

Most of these issues can be very easily solved if there was a way to ensure that once a scheme is created, the means to receive money from that scheme involved the government collecting your identification data remotely and simply sending you the funds, and the transaction is recorded, viewable by both government and receiver at all times, and cannot be changed at any time, whether you have a bank account or not. With such a system, the atmosphere, realities, and narratives around receiving government aid would change drastically.

On October 1, 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Federal Government will release a Central Bank Digital Currency called eNaira, designed to do exactly this. Built on the Distributed Ledger Technology system, eNaira has been reportedly poised to leverage on the security infrastructures of the system, and the peer-to-peer trust-inducing facilities provided by the system to ensure that money intended to be sent to you from the government once you qualify for a relief fund gets to you directly. This solves more than half of the problems government relief funds are facing today; this makes the participating MDAs for each relief fund care about the narrative again, and while doing the work, goes ahead to defend itself, with hard proof, of its transparent, equitable and dutiful distribution of funds. This buys back the people’s belief and trust lost by inability to back operations with data and facts. This changes the government relief aid game for the better, benefitting Nigerians and the Nigerian Governments.

This is the eNaira effect.

> Asuquo Kenneth has been involved in social development projects in North-Eastern Nigeria for over 10 years now. He is a student of Agricultural and Bioresources Engineering from the University of Calabar, and begun his foray into the world of Social Development from volunteering for local farmers’ empowerment projects. Now, he manages up to 4 social development projects at a time, in fields far from agriculture. In his spare time, he is writing about his experiences on the field or playing football with his mates.

Receiving Government Aid Gets More Effective; The eNaira Effect

I am going to paint pictures with this piece. Pictures from the past, from today, and predictions for the future, then I will create a nexus between the three and drop my pen, leaving you to make your inferences. But be aware that your inferences, perceptions and opinions about the issues I will raise is entirely your responsibility. Let’s get to business.

First, me. Who I am. It is not necessary for you to know, but the knowledge can afford you the visual stimulus to absorb what you are about to read with better understanding, stronger opinion-forming temerity, and an overall grip of the mood of the article. My name is Quadri Abdulbaseet, a Financial Technology (FinTech) Analyst and fast-rising social commentator whose opinions are reports from the lenses of objectivity and a clear conscience. I have been interested in personal data and issues bordering on digital transaction confidentiality for almost a decade now.

Matters of digital transaction confidentiality can seem so far-fetched for so many people and it is understandable because the custodians of the small details are not always willing to volunteer them. I have told the stories I tell clandestinely up until now because I sense a shift in the way things will be done from now on, but before we get to the shifts, here is something you have to know about the personal data you surrender to your banks, and what has been going on with it all this while.

In the not-so-distant past, some 14 years ago, it was super easy to find you if I had the faintest access to bank servers and database repositories. And then, I absolutely did not need any form of advanced digital sleuthing skills to gain this access. I only had to make a couple of swipes here, run a couple of password-breaking algorithms there, and voila! I see nearly all records of your personal information provided to your bank, and I can do whatever I want to do with it.

In March of 2008, Heartland Payment Systems, a U.S.-based payment processing and technology provider, experienced the biggest data breach in their history. At the time of the breach, Heartland was processing north of 100 million credit card transactions per month for 175,000 merchants. The breach was discovered by Visa and MasterCard nearly a year later, in January 2009, when Visa and MasterCard notified Heartland of suspicious transactions. The attackers exploited a known vulnerability to perform a SQL injection attack. The impact was the exposure of 134 million credit cards. The company paid an estimated $145 million in compensation for fraudulent payments. In July of 2013, Capital One, an American bank holding company specializing in credit cards, auto loans, banking, and savings accounts, identified a security breach of its customer records that exposed the personal information of its customers, including credit card data, social security numbers, and bank account numbers. The impact? 106 million credit card numbers we exposed. In September of 2014, The Home Depot, the largest home improvement retailer in the United States, supplying tools, construction products, and services, announced that its POS systems had been infected with a custom-built malware, which posed as anti-virus software. The impact? Exposure of the credit card information of 56 million customers. 
In Nigeria, and even in more recent times, data breaches have become a cause for concern. In September of 2020, a self-acclaimed hacker, one Ihebuzo Chris, posted a video on Twitter where he spoke about Access Bank’s security vulnerabilities and flipped through pages of an A-4 paper containing what he said were the bank’s customers’ sensitive personal information. In the same month, another hacker boasted on Twitter that he had Unity Bank’s customers’ data which he threatened to share with the public in “dumps”. In June of 2019, a 67-year-old woman was arraigned before an Igbosere Magistrates’ Court, Lagos, for allegedly hacking into a First Bank Plc account and stealing the sum of N16.2million. Over 40% of business executives argue that exposure and loss of personally identifiable information pose the most significant risk to their companies.

Those are just recent popular examples of bank hacks in Nigeria, and again, those are just hacks, involving algorithms, ransomware, bloatware, and spyware. There are several ways personal information can be obtained: initiating fraudulent deals to obtain data, impersonation of close relatives or close business associates to obtain data, opening suspicious or offshore accounts in someone else’s name and running integration with legal bank accounts using the encountered bottlenecks to obtain true data. The means are endless. These are the ploys and schemes the Hushpuppi’s and Mompha’s of today deploy to infiltrate bank data reserves, find data, and use data.

Data breaches still happen today, in the banking sector and outside of it. Internationally, LinkedIn had a data breach in June of 2021 impacting 700 million users, Sociallarks, a rapidly growing Chinese social media agency, had a data breach in January of 2021 impacting 200 million of their records. In January of 2021 too, Bonobos, the popular men’s clothing store, had a data breach impacting 12.3 million of their customer records. Similar situations happened to MeetMindful and Pixlr too in 2021.
Recent records in the finance sector have smaller breaches going on here and there leading many to begin relying on cryptocurrencies…until the acclaimed father of all crypto, Bitcoin, was so publicly and so overwhelmingly hacked, using twitter as the phishing tool [phishing is a type of social engineering attack often used to steal user data, including login credentials and credit card numbers. It occurs when an attacker, masquerading as a trusted entity, dupes a victim into opening an email, instant message, or text message] and not just the accounts of any one and every one, but the accounts of icons and celebrities (and even companies) who have their financial records sealed as tight as can be possible: Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Floyd Mayweather, Jeff Bezos, MrBeast, Michael Blomberg, Warren Buffet, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Apple, Uber, Cash App. This attack, occurring between 8pm and 10pm UTC on July 15, 2020, reportedly targeted 130 high profile twitter accounts.

The question becomes: where do we go from here? What is the future going to look like with the realities of Personal Data breaches today? What measures are being taken? Cryptocurrency first posed as the answer, but just as the bitcoin hack showed, cryptocurrency, while hosted on the very trusted blockchain distributed ledger system (DLT), has one major flaw: it is private, its miners unknown, and its minter unknown. When it fails, who would you hold accountable? When your private key is cracked, how do you rectify? Which government help can you call on to initiate Anti-Money Laundering (AML) protocols to track and recover your information? The solution therefore is, for as much as we have theorized its benign practicality, a system run on DLT, but distributed in retail to existing custodians of money with fiscal policies and protocols that already protect customers’ money and enables quick recovery should a hack happen. This is the exact design of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) setup. This setup ensures that phishing, impersonation and other forms of identity theft schemes fail from the start. The biggest, and if done right, only vulnerability to it is hacking, and that too can be prevented by being dutiful, consistent and frequent in running digital security checks on the backbone systems the CBDCs are hosted on.

The Central Bank of Nigeria has set up its own CBDC called the eNaira and plans to launch it on October 1. eNaira, reportedly run on the DLT, will be a Legal Tender for Nigeria pegged on the Naira, will run a 2-Tier Retail CBDC Model, users having account-based wallets, and approach personal data-collection and storage for onboarding with a Tiered AML/KYC Approach (NIN, BVN as unique identifiers).  With tried and tested AML, CFL and KYC protocols running on top of the DLT system for eNaira, there is hope for user data protection. NITDA’s 2019 Data Protection Regulation can now have a good peg to actuate its mandates to the fullest on all financial and non-financial entities who collect user data.

This is what the future looks like in Nigeria. The conclusions to draw are now left for you. What are your perceptions? What are your opinions? What are your inferences? Do you have hope? Will the eNaira deliver? I sure hope it does. We will see.
Thank you for coming with me on this little data-driven adventure and have a good evening from Niger State.
> Quadri Abdulbaseet is something of a mixture of nearly all programming and tech-based skills you can find today. He is the Jack of all those trades, but a master of data and privacy-related algorithm designs, by choice. Quadri is a freelancer who has worked with private digital security agencies whose interfaces and backbone technologies protect a lot of social and messaging media apps from being hacked. Quadri is 37 years old and married with 3 kids.

Personal Data, The eNaira, And Matters Of Digital Transaction Confidentiality

Dear reader, permit me to introduce myself. My name is eNaira, and I will be traveling soon. I will be traveling because it is important I make this journey. A lot of good is riding on it. The spread of this good is dependent on the success and results of this journey. On this trip, I will be coming with my wallet. I call it “Speed”; and you will find me knocking at your door with it.
You are probably asking why you care who I am and what this has to do with you. The answer is that you care because of my name; you care because of the weight it carries and what it signifies. You care because you hope; beyond the many doubts, you hope. And trust me, this journey is for you. It is for the entirety of Nigeria, and her welfare.

Why am I traveling then? Glad you asked. There are about 8 million Nigerians, most running businesses too, who, for reasons of being too far away, or being too scared, have not tasted what it means to buy, sell or own a share, have not tasted what it means to obtain a loan, do not know what it is to invest in assets, do not know by experience the benefits of buying bonds or buying foreign exchange. They have money, physical money, and all they do with their money is give it to another, receive it from another, buy an item, or give it as “change” when they sell an item. I want to change their world, because they deserve too to enjoy the benefits of having money make more money for them all on its own.

Why am I traveling? Because disability can be a reason for financial vulnerability, which in turn can lead to financial exclusion. Nigeria’s disabled population is an estimated 25 million. I carry Speed with me because it is a product built also with the disabled in mind. Definitely, there is room for improvement with Speed, as not all disabled groups might yet be able to directly interact with Speed, but a good number are, and that is a win for me.

I am traveling after taking my time to deliberately learn all known languages spoken from the borders of Sabon Birni before Niger Republic to Madagali before Cameroon to Brass before the Gulf of Guinea to Seme before Benin Republic to Lake Chad. The objective is to go where no POS service has ever gone. To go where no ATM has ever gone. To communicate in their languages, eat their food, show them how they can use the services I offer through an app if they have a smart phone, or through USSD, if they do not.

I carry with me the promise of further broadband penetration with the continual permeation of 5G in Nigeria. I carry with me the promise of and incentive to increasing the smartphone penetration in Nigeria from 32million users to far greater numbers. I carry with me the promise to address the concerns of the underbanked as well: financial service consumers who use informal and unregulated financial services provided by savings groups (like the Alajos and Esusu) and cooperatives. They may have bank accounts to their name, but rarely, if ever, use them, and opt to empty their accounts once they receive any funds in them. For them, I am prepared to formalize their savings mentality and visions, not just for the sake of including them into formal systems, but with a clear roadmap where the formal systems give them better than the services the informal systems do, with hard evidences.

Hills, rivers, valleys. City to city, state to state, hamlet to hamlet, village to village, my aim is the same. It would only take a little time, but it would be worth it in the end. What I simply need from you is that you come along with me on this journey, with your words, your solidarity, and where you can, your support via volunteering energy. This can be achieved. Imagine your aged uncles or non-formally educated aunties in the village getting access to financial services that can change their lives. eNaira is purposed exactly for them.

So, join in.

> Blessing Joy Emeyonu is a spoken word poet, creative contributor for lifestyle and travel blogs and magazines, and a singer. Blessing believes in a Nigerian dream that sees positive change in the many aspects of being a Nigerian that has proved problematic start with the simplest, littlest things. This has been reflected in a lot of her creative pieces.

Reaching The Unreached: A Poetic Treatise On A Noble Objective Of The eNaira


The introduction of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) has always seemed like a football competition to me, with all the countries who are at various stages of adoption on the league table. It seemed to have come as a sudden rush by central banks of – the tally now is – 81 countries to start their journeys into CBDCs within 2020 till now, but the truth is that it has been in the works for most of these countries for so much longer. Different countries are establishing theirs for different reasons, and just like goals in a football match, many have prepped, trained, hired players, set formations, to ensure they score the specific goals they have planned to. Some teams are warming up, others are on their pitches, while the rest are intent on studying the game plans and moves of the ones deep in it, and then adopt or tweak.

Nigeria is one of the countries warming up. In nine days, on October 1 to be more precise, Nigeria will find herself on the CBDC League pitch, playing against herself, and the rest of the world. She plans to launch the eNaira. Yes, for early adopters, the CBDC game is tripartite, and weird, and cannot be an “us vs. them” game, because who is “them” here? The league is still fresh; there are a lot of rules-formation and experimentation still going on. The objective now for countries is to outdo themselves, and set a strong and formidable pace for the rest of the world. Nigeria is in that shoe, and hopes to be a pace-setter (the pace-setter), as she just might be the 12th nation in the world to fully adopt the use of CBDCs after The Bahamas, the Eastern Caribbean countries (Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines) and China.

The Giant of Africa is entering the pitch to score eight main goals to stay on top of the league table. These goals have been drawn from the peculiarities of financial transactions in Nigeria itself, and the realities of financial challenges of fiat currency experienced all over the world. The goals are as indigenous as they are universal; as particular as they are wholesome. And each goal has players – stakeholders of the digital currency – primed to use their unique positioning and skill to see to it that it is not a goal that can be discounted. No offsides, no goal-outside-play, no handballs. Just straight, transparent-to-the-world, and a strong leverage for the country in this CBDC game.

Nigeria says she will score the first goal using local talents. eNaira has the ambition to present itself as that currency that unbanked and underbanked Nigerians and Nigerian businesses will run to, rely on, and enjoy, better than the fiat currency they have either not had access to, or have been on the run from, for one reason or the other. As at 2018, 36.8% of Nigerians did not have access to financial services. The aim is to make the eNaira easy enough, safe and secure enough, and hassle-free enough in its use that the moment one move is made by local talents towards an unbanked or underbanked Nigerian or Nigerian business, they are sold into immediate adoption.

The second goal Nigeria wishes to score will have financial houses already in the Nigerian financial ecosystem as the target strikers. From capital market players, to commercial banks, to industrial banks, to insurance organizations, to finance technology and finance support organizations, the eNaira is prepped to be their ally, and not only that, the very tool they can use to affect the ecosystem they play in in such a way that eNaira begins to foster economic growth. The number one strategy for this is easier access (to financial services offered by these houses). The number two strategy is transaction costs at nearly-zero interest transaction rates.
Scoring the third goal has been placed on the shoulders of the Nigerian Government Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), at the Federal, State, and Local Government Levels. This goal is built around making the eNaira less and less accessible for persons with fraudulent intent. An average of 80% of all financial frauds committed per year on the Naira is electronic. This reality is what has driven the design for this goal towards achieving that state of being where persons who wish to commit financial crimes (fraud, laundering, identity theft) become so afraid of touching the eNaira that they eventually stay away from it completely. eNaira’s traceability, at per-transaction and per-unit levels, is the tool Nigeria has said she will use to make this happen.

The fourth goal will be a combination effort of regular Nigerians and the Government MDAs, like a one-two clinical finish that bamboozles the defense. And boy, will this goal bamboozle current defenses and obstacles it faces right now if actuated to design. One of the things that connect government and citizens is receiving government aid, benefitting the citizens with the aid relief, and benefitting the government by keeping account of key indexes around standard of living of her citizens. Currently, the Nigerian National Social Register (NSR) has only about 2.6 million households (about 11 million people) registered on its platform. That accounts to about 6% of the population of the country. This is so low because there has not really been an incentive to marry the government’s laborious efforts to ascertain the social status of her citizens and the citizens’ desires to be indexed by the government. eNaira’s design on directness of transaction aims to become this needed incentive, that will end up translating to a reality where government aid becomes a simple send-receive-record process.

The fifth goal involves the same players for goal number four. The brace between goal four and goal five is delicious by design, and as goal four’s social appeal tilts towards the citizens (inasmuch as it benefits both government and citizens), goal five’s social appeal tilts more towards the government; and like goal four, it also does benefit both government and citizens. The goal is revenue increase. Nigeria says its adoption of eNaira will see government save up to 80% of the costs associated with the production, storage, transportation, and disposal attributed with cash. Adoption will also reduce tax evasion, and streamline tax collection channels, due to the eNaira’s traceability. Paying government dues will become a process that completely eliminates purported cases of middlemen, and as such, encourages citizens to pay their respective dues, and not avoid them. All three tactics, driven towards increased revenue.

The sixth goal involves international players. It is a goal that aims to connect home and abroad through finances better than has ever been seen or experienced before. Nigeria says she is making the remittance process so easy that sending money from foreign currency to Nigerians at home as eNaira becomes nearly exact as making a regular money transfer to anyone at home from home, and even faster.

The seventh goal involves our international players too. It addresses the other thing Nigerians do with international currency aside sending home – making purchases with it. Which in turn, involves converting to other currencies before trade is complete. Before now, the process has been a hassle, especially with differences between official rates and parallel market rates, the fluctuations of the rates, unforeseen price inflations, among other obstacles. Nigeria has said it has designed eNaira to address these hassles by making each process of getting remittance from diaspora cheaper, safer, quicker, and better. Nigeria has also applied the same design to local trade with the eNaira as well, taking on the trade challenges on this CBDC league from both angles – the perfect counter.
The eight goal addresses what many see as the elephant in the room. It is the goal meant to beat the box-packing tactics of the opposition in one fell swoop. Security. Nigeria has said that eNaira cannot be forged or counterfeited due to its unique identity and security structure. It is loaded, on top of the security facilities in its Distributed Ledger Technology, with bleeding-edge CFT (Combating the Financing of Terrorism), AML (Anti-Money Laundering), and KYC (Know-Your-Customer) facilities that make it secure for every legitimate user, and a ticking time bomb for anyone who attempts to use it illegitimately.

As amazing and probable these goals are however, for them to count and not be cancelled by the socio-economic VARs that already challenge them, Nigeria must ensure that she is well-prepared to handle waves of traffic right from launch date, well-prepared to answer all the questions of critics and naysayers satisfactorily ith evidences, well-prepared to troubleshoot any eventual issues in real-time so that users do not suffer losses they did not bargain for, and finally, Nigeria must be well-prepared to be meticulous: pay attention to the numbers and statistics that arise from the use of eNaira, analyze them, and ensure that newer and more precise strategies are consistently being designed and implemented to see that those numbers and stats are always in the green, just like Nigeria’s desire to remain in the green of the pitch of this league, in the leading position.
As a patriot, I hope Nigeria does not only score, but wins, on all fronts.

> Adenike Ogundipe Momoh is a private sports analyst and restaurant waitress. She has been involved in sourcing, collating, analyzing and interpreting data for top Nigerian and international sports newspapers and magazines for 5 years running. In her spare time, she is either watching Arsenal FC or watching Marvel movies.

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