This December Nigerians banks have made it hard for millions of Nigerians to withdraw money from ATMs.
Nigerian banks have had no chill this December especially within the last 7 days. A week before Christmas several ATMs in Lagos had no cash in them or had one technical difficulty or the other.
When it was two days to Christmas it was really bad and on Christmas eve, it was a nightmare. In several banks, hundreds of people lined up to withdraw their money for the holidays but Nigerians banks had other plans.
This however was not only a Lagos thing. According to social media, banks refused to allow people to withdraw via ATMs during this Christmas period. Many people stuck in queues lamented why their banks would treat them like this especially during the holiday season when they needed their money the most. Their cries and pleas fell on deaf ears and hundreds of people had to queue for hours just to withdraw their money.
This has been a normal occurrence during the holiday season. Nigerian banks love to hold back money from people because they fear that their won't be any money left in their branches if people take out all their cash. This year the situation was worse due to the cash crunch from the economic recession.
The long queues at ATMs will surely go on to the New Year when most people would have spent all their savings after spending hours in banks.
This situation reminds me of the popular Ponzi scheme MMM which announced that it was freezing operations in December due to some system overload of sorts. Nigerian banks are sort of like MMM. They are basically withholding money from Nigerians who entrusted them with their savings. At the end of the day you could say they froze operations too.
I guess the fans of MMM were sort of right. The antics of most Nigerian banks led millions to invest in Ponzi schemes. Surprisingly, the CBN has always looked the other way during this period. No bank has been sanctioned for its poor ATM services during holidays.
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