By Chisaa Okoye (Business reporter)

Barely three days, to the January 31 deadline for old 1000, 500 and 200 naira notes to cease to be legal tender in Nigeria, the scarcity of the redesigned new naira notes has persisted as commercial banks in Lagos on Friday were still paying their customers with old notes.

The CBN said “it massively supplied the new naira notes to commercial banks to dispense both at counters and ATMs.”

The apex bank also directed bank customers to start rejecting old naira notes from banks, insisting that the old notes will cease to be legal tender by January 31 as earlier stipulated.

However, checks by ARMADANEWS on Friday afternoon showed that Zenith Bank, Fidelity, GTCO (GTBank)  as well as First City Monument Bank (FCMB) located in Ogba area of Lagos state were still giving old naira notes to customers at the counters.

The bank tellers told ARMADANEWS that the new naira notes are scarce thus their decision “to give out the old notes that are available.”

“What we are able to get from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), we pay to our customers. We don’t have enough. We load our ATMS with the little we receive from the CBN so that’s why we still pay our customers with the old naira notes. We believe the situation may improve by next week”, a staff of one of the banks said.

Only a few banks ATMS dispensed the new notes. At Zenith Bank and GTBank ATMS at Ogba, a customer could only withdraw a maximum of N10,000 from the ATM, while other banks pay up to N20,000.

The House of Representatives had summoned the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele to explain why the new naira notes are scarce but he failed to honour the the invitation of the House of Representatives ad hoc committee which is investigating the scarcity of the new naira notes.

Irked by the development, Chairman of the Committee, Ado Doguwa, berated the apex bank governor for disregarding the invitation for the second day and also failed to send a representative.

Earlier, the Speaker of House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila had threatened to issue a warrant of arrest on Emefiele and bank directors over their collective refusal to honour an invite by the green chamber over scarcity of three newly designed naira notes.

Gbajabiamila, in a statement on Thursday, said the bank chiefs, by shunning the invitation of the House, insulted the authority and prerogatives of the people’s parliament, adding it is unacceptable.