At the end of the National Council of State (NCS) meeting held in Abuja on Friday, the Council has thrown its support behind the naira redesign policy recently introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), on the condition that the central bank either prints enough of the new naira notes or allows the old notes to coexist with the new ones.

The policy has been immersed in chaos due to poor circulation of the redesigned naira notes, which has been attributed to insufficient printing of the new naira notes.

The 2023 NCS meeting, which was presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari, and was graced by former presidents, including Goodluck Jonathan and Olusegun Obasanjo, was among other things, to deliberate on the policy, which has become a national concern.

Governor Darius Ishaku of Taraba state told newsmen after the meeting that as much as the Council is backing the policy, it would want the CBN to recirculate old notes if it cannot print enough new notes. He said the move will ease the economic tension created by the scarcity of the new naira notes.

Currently, the federal government is facing several lawsuits from states including Kogi, Kaduna, Ondo and Zamfara, seeking to stop the CBN from implementing the policy, at the Supreme Court. Though the lawsuit has been described as political, the states said they’re seeking to ameliorate the economic hardship the policy has unleashed in the country.

Speaking on the matter also, the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, acknowledged the need for aggressive action from the CBN, but said that the policy stands.

“The council agreed that there is need for aggressive action on the part of the CBN as it relates to the implementation of the policy by way of ensuring adequate provision being made with particular regard to the supply of the Naira in the system,” he said.

On Thursday, Malami said the federal government will obey the order of the Supreme Court, mandating the CBN and commercial banks to allow for transactions with the old naira notes pending the determination of the suit brought before it by the states on February 15.

The federal government has remained resolute in implementing the policy despite the hiccups that have characterized the currency swap exercise. However, it is not clear if there is going to be a change this time, following the NCS meeting.

Buhari had earlier said that the policy is for the economic benefit of the country, urging Nigerians to bear with the CBN as it makes efforts to ensure that it is successfully implemented.

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The federal government of Nigeria has said it would obey the ruling of the Supreme Court, suspending the implementation of the February 10 deadline for the naira swap exercise mandated by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

This was made known by the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, during his appearance on AriseTV on Thursday. But the AGF said the federal government is taking necessary steps to ensure that the Supreme Court’s interim order is set aside.

He disclosed that the federal government, in regard to rule of law, will obey the Supreme Court’s order while working out modalities within the provisions of law to challenge the lawsuit that resulted in the order.

The Minister called the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to handle the case into question. He said that the singular fact that the CBN was not joined as a party in the suit robbed the apex court of necessary jurisdiction. He said the federal government will be challenging the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to handle the case next week Wednesday, and also will fight to vacate the interim order.

On Wednesday, a seven-member panel of the apex court presided by Justice John Okoro, suspended the February 10 deadline, pending the determination of an ex parte application brought by three northern states; Kogi, Kaduna and Zamfara, challenging the CBN’s policy. The hearing is billed to hold on Wednesday, February 15.

The three states had asked the Supreme Court to quash the CBN’s implementation of the February 10 deadline, set to phase out the old naira notes. The federal government had, late last year, unveiled redesigned N200, N500 and N1,000 notes, setting a January 31 deadline for the old notes to be returned to the banks. The deadline was later extended to February 10.

However, the implementation of the currency swap has been marred by the insufficiency of the redesigned naira notes, unleashing economic hardship as cash scarcity undermines economic activities. The three states, in their argument, said in addition to the suffering the currency swap has caused, the federal government did not give adequate period of time for the implementation of the policy and that the CBN did not follow laid down procedure.

However, the Supreme Court’s restraining order has been criticized by many legal practitioners, with some asking the federal government to ignore it and go ahead to enforce the February 10 deadline.

Malami, clearing the confusion that has trailed the apex court’s ruling, said the federal government will abide by the order until Wednesday next week when it will challenge the lawsuit brought by three states.

“I think what we are talking about is not whether the ruling is binding or not binding, we are talking about what we intend to do, there is no doubt about the fact that the ruling of the Supreme Court, regardless of the prevailing circumstances, is binding and then within the context of the rule of law.

“And what we are doing in essence is in compliance with the rule of law both in terms of obedience to the ruling and in terms of challenging the ruling by way of putting across our own side of the story, putting across our case, challenging jurisdiction.

“So the issue of obedience to the ruling of the Supreme Court is out of it. We are wholeheartedly in agreement that naturally, we are bound by it and will comply accordingly. But within the context of compliance, we shall challenge the ruling by way of filing an application seeking for it to be set aside, it is all about the rule of law,” he said.

Malami added that the federal government will challenge the Jurisdiction on the grounds that when you talk of monetary policy, regardless of the characters they take, the central bank is an indispensable and a necessary party for that matter.

“What we have at hand is a situation where the central bank was not joined as a party and if the central bank as an institution was not joined as a party, the position of the law is clear that the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court cannot be properly invoked,” he said.

The federal government is arguing that it is the Federal High Court and not the Supreme Court that is vested with the exclusive jurisdiction to entertain this suit.

On Monday, a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja had ruled against any move to force the CBN to extend the February 10 deadline. The federal government is arguing based on this, that the plaintiffs have no cause of action.

“This suit is an abuse of judicial process. The plaintiffs have no locus standi to institute this action. The plaintiffs have no reasonable cause of action against the defendant,” it said in its response to the lawsuit.

“until now, artificial intelligence could read and write, but could not understand the content. The new programs like ChatGPT will make many office jobs more efficient by helping to write invoices or letters. This will change our world” – says Bill Gates.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in a recent interview revealed that OpenAI Chatbot ChatGPT which is currently the rave of the moment will change the world.

Gates, while speaking to a German business daily, stated that a chatbot that gives strikingly human-like responses to user queries is as significant as the invention of the internet.

Yes, my engineering PhD was on neuromorphic computational system where we work to model the event-driven asynchronous parallelism of the central nervous system, bringing the plasticity which is evident in biological systems into silicon, to enable a new age, not based on zeroes and ones, but on spiking-neural computing. I got a US patent on that effort and the US Government licensed the effort (with many goodies for the village boy). But what we are toiling to achieve on silicon cannot be compared to what the natural language computing paradigm we’re witnessing by the likes of ChatGPT, Bard, etc has demonstrated in production.

Indeed, as we work to recreate the synaptic-neural communication in circuits, these guys invented a way for machines to become like humans, on natural language computing.

People, that is a huge deal.  But a bigger deal will come when these ChatGPTs become powered by neuromorphic computers, drastically reducing the energy requirements to juice them up. Amazing things are coming up in this world. My company, an Intel programmable microprocessor partner, remains at the epicenter of that future.

Our world will change! #invent

Comment on Feed

Comment 1: In May of 2002, W.D. Smart and L.P. Kaelbling, researchers at Washington University and M.I.T., respectively, published a paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
entitled “Effective Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Robots” in which they laid out the framework for programming robots with the ability to prioritize outcomes of actions.

In other words, the Smart and Kaelbling framework made it possible for automated systems, including autonomous robots, to want some things to happen in preference to others. This reward system was seen as the basis for artificial intelligence learning in a
chaotic environment.

This capability is what separates automated machines from welfare-aligned sentient beings. This is a better test of artificial intelligence than the “fool an observer into thinking you’re a human while carrying on a conversation” test. It’s relatively easy to predict what might happen next. Being able to care what happens next is another matter!

Comment 2: This is indeed huge going by the impact that programs like chatGPT are offering as well as many AI driven innovation.

On one hand, the future of work and expertise will change as I can simply chatGPT anything and assume the role of a subject matter expert within minutes simply by using the right prompts.

Critics of AI will say “it will replace people”, ” it’s putting people’s job at risk” etc.

Yes. That’s true.

The same way that Computer replaced typewriters but went on to create new job opportunities is what I see AI will do.

In the immediate, one way of re-inventing oneself for the future of work is to understand how to utilize these AI tools for your advantage.

You can start on this journey by Googling or ChatGPTing PROMPT ENGINEERING