Last week, I shared in this column, my preview of the cashless policy and my simple strategy for its achievement. That was eight years ago. Today, we take some excerpts from that preview (in 2011) as well as share with you my review of the programme in its first year of operation, which was seven years ago (Ik Muo, Cashless Banking: So Far, how far? BusinessDay. 16/10/12). Kindly read on, noting that the developments mentioned here are now 7/8 years “old”.
…Furthermore, as an OB practitioner and a student of change management, I make bold to state unequivocally that attitudinal change is never successfully legislated. Change involves negotiation, persuasion, explanation, education, awareness and consensus building. Most important, the WIIIFM question (What Is in It for Me) must be satisfactorily addressed. There is nothing wrong in legislating change; but such a legislation will not lead to the expected change. Of course, there is a gulf of difference between change and transition because the ultimate destination is a transition to the desired mindset, attitude and behaviours.
People are also rewarded to change. Ordinarily, behaviour can be shaped through positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment and elimination. Probably because of our years of militarised governance, we readily rely on punishment or at best, negative reinforcement.
Part of the reasons for this new cash policy and other related initiatives is to reduce cost-to-serve (which should actually be the concern of the banks). It is obvious that the cost of physical cash withdrawals is higher than the cost of the various automated and electronic alternatives. What efforts have the banks made to share the gains (savings) of non-cash operations with their customers? If it costs N10 to serve a walk-in customer and N2 to serve an ATM customer, why should banks not pay customers N3 per transaction to migrate to the ATMs? Why abolish Commission on Turnover (COT) to ATM customers (or charge lower COT) as an inducement for patronising that channel?
Of course, that is in our character! The government will not provide parking spaces or urinal for the public, and boldly place sing-boards that read “Don’t Park” and “Don’t urinate” everywhere and punish people for parking and urinating – because they must urinate and they must park!
The central bank has invested a humongous quantum of resources (quantifiable and mostly unquantifiable) to prosecute in the last two years. A lot of hard cash, intellectual capital, truth and propaganda have been invested in the project and people in advertisement, POS/ATM business have been smiling to the bank. And Tunde Lemo, DGM Ops, CBN has lost some weight as he preaches and prances from one TV programme to another conference to the next newspaper house and yet another radio interview to explain why and how there is no alternative to cashlessness.
I wish to state upfront that I support the cashless agenda and it may even be an appropriate priority project. But what I am not comfortable about is the shock and awe approach to its implementation, the punitive dimension, failure to differentiate between change and transition and assuming that a habit that had been in our character for ages will be changed by a few newspaper adverts, TV appearances, draconian charges and orders from the CBN.
It is important to note that we are not the first to attempt to migrate from one payment system or platform to another. Thus, there is no need raising unnecessary dust as if it has not been done before or as if our own migration is unique. Let us examine a recent report in the technology section of Financial Times by Richard Waters and published by BusinessDay of 8/10/12(p60).
It is all about efforts to apply the near-field technology to upgrade the payment system so as to create a commercial environment without cash and cards. It involves recognising people with their pictures as they approach, billing, selling to them and sending the debit receipt to their smart-phones. One thing about this techy wonder is that it is being driven by customers who are tired of carrying cards and wallets and the technopreneurs who are developing the system and hoping to make a kill with their inventions.
The banks are not involved and definitely, the FED is not a party to these developments which as at now are being spearheaded by about 150 developers around the globe. The ultimate goal is to develop digital wallets where smartphone users will store virtualised methods of payment together with loyalty cards, gift cards, receipts and methods of identification.
While the technology is being perfected and customers are impatient, the developers keep on working on various options to improve their offerings, reduce costs, increase reliability and keep the customers happy. The retailers are also on the standby, keying into the system and strategizing on how to migrate to the new technology. Nobody is breathing down anybody’s neck; nobody is paying outrageous charges; nobody is licensing the vendors [which some lawyers have declared as illegal and against free-market operations] and nobody is punished for withdrawing or depositing his/her money. The head of the payment arm of eBay also has a word of advice for us here when he said that “changing habits takes time and changing habits in money takes more time.”
The lessons from the above experience are very clear and compares unfavourably with our own attempt to force cashlessness on the people. The CBN has literarily abandoned its other daunting responsibilities while the banks, the machine vendors and other relevant service providers are just hanging out there with their clippers, shaving off our accounts with reckless abandon.
Incidentally, the major indicator of success being harped upon by the CBN and the banks is the number of POS deployed and scheduled to be deployed. Whether those POSs are being utilised, whether they are working, peoples’ dissatisfaction with the double charges, and the issue of electricity and failure of technology are cleverly played down.
As a student of change management, I am not surprised at this emphasis on the POS deployment statistics. In the politics of change management, one of the key areas of intense politicking is in the choice of indicators of success. People want indicators that portray their performance very positively. Thus, while the number of POS is a very positive indicator, the number of active POS may not be that flattering. For a start, the POS figures are conflicting.
In a chart published in THISDAY (27/6/12) and sourced from CBN, the POS deployment was stated as rising from 18,874 in March, 2012 to 100,000 in June, 2012. However, Olu Adaramewa, a deputy director with CBN recently stated that as at December, 2011, there were 40,000 POS in “circulation” (conference on Nigerian transition to cashlessness, 8/10/12).
But the key issue is that a recent report from NIBSS, reports that there are only 14,000 active POS as at July, 2012. NIBBS is the POS aggregator in Nigeria. So, only about 10 percent of the POS are operational and this woeful picture is due to poor knowledge and skill, attitude, technical issues, delayed receipts etc. That is bad enough.
Other matters: Nigeria at 59 – As we are being raped…!
I didn’t want to make any comments on this 59thIndependence anniversary. It has become a mere show, devoid of its historical and existential significance. And… beyond the public holidays, people no longer remember that October1 is here. There is this sardonic joke of unknown origin: that a woman who is being raped and cannot do anything about it, should relax and enjoy the thing. I remembered that joke, which I only refer to whenever I believe that I am in a “safe environment”, when I also realised, as I reminisced on this independent anniversary, that we are being brazenly RAPED.
We are being raped by “EXECUTHIEVES” who do not know what to execute and how to execute the “nothing”, who impose harsh economic medicaments on the masses while their bank accounts are ballooning, whose only expertise is on horse-trading and blame-trading and who see nothing wrong in our lopsided governance structure.
We are being raped by legislooters who earn the highest in the world and who believe that spending N5 billion plus on cars is nothing much in an environment where an Nth committee is being set up on the minimum wage. We are being raped by the judiciary where “technicality”, however defined, is more important that law and justice. And if the high and mighty cannot obtain justice, you can then imagine the fate of the proverbial common man.
But the greatest problem is that while we are being raped by the government, we are also raping ourselves! We are being raped by greedy pastors who live in sinful opulence while their followers live in indescribable poverty, by those engaged in criminal entrepreneurship: merchants of fake drugs, kidnap kingpins and their consultants, native doctors whose only strength depend on human sacrifice, transporters who triple their fares once there is a sign of increased demand, policemen who will readily request for “partikolas” even from their parents and area boys who brazenly dispossess bus drivers of their earnings, with the support of big men who would look the other way.
So, what do we do as we are being raped all-round?
But I believe that it shall come to pass; I believe that Nigerian go survive and I pray that the future generations will not be as docile as this generation so that when our political-servants refuse to serve, they will ask questions and if necessary, fire those servants.
I thank God for making it to October 2019. My friend of 40 years, Anthony Maduka, a jolly good fellow, who is so tall that I named him Long-John and who distributed happiness all around him, could not make it. He died on 30/9/19. However, bad things happen, lets thank God for life because once there is life, there is still HOPE. Happy independence to all men of goodwill
IK MUO
Department of Business Administration, OOU, Ago Iwoye
