In an interview with Channels TV’s Sunrise Daily, Ademola Abass, a legal practitioner, claimed that 60% of the population does not have a bank account.
He said this while discussing the difficulties that the redesigned naira and the attempt at a cashless system have brought on for Nigerians.
In his words, “60% of Nigerians don’t own bank accounts, this is statistics coming from CBN itself; people are in the hinterlands where there are no banks at all…”
Abass said the policy and the timing by Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), was sudden and has imperiled Nigerians.
verification
According to a 2008 study on financial access, only 18.3 million Nigerians, or 21.1% of the total population, had access to financial services, leaving 52.5% of adults without a bank account. The percentage of unbanked people decreased to 46.3% in 2010.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) thereafter developed the National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS), a scheme designed to bring people who do not currently have access to financial services into the financial system.
The National Financial Inclusion Strategy was launched in 2012 with the goal of reducing the percentage of Nigerians without access to financial services from 46.3% in 2010 to 20% by 2020.
However, according to the NFIS 2022 report published by the CBN, 64.1% of Nigerians currently have access to financial services, bringing the overall proportion of adults who are financially excluded to only 36%.
verdict:
The claim that 60% of Nigerians do not have bank accounts is false. No recent CBN data shows that 60 percent of Nigerians do not have bank accounts.