Maybe it's because I don't often receive cash as payment for the services I render that I see digital transactions as the coolest means of payment these days compared to using cash.
There's one of my clients who is into fashion, and many times, I would see him moving around looking for one POS operator or another to deposit the cash he had earned from what his customers paid him.
"How come you get cash in such quantities?" I would always ask him because it usually looks strange to me, considering the fact that he doesn't sell tomatoes, pepper, fish, or other petty items in the market that people usually pay for with cash.
"It's the customers oooh. But aside from that, I prefer cash because it doesn't give me the trouble of waiting for the money to reflect in my account in cases where a customer makes a transfer." His reply always puts me off because I can't imagine being stuck with banks that delay transactions. Well, that's his own life.
I would have said we should do away with cash and switch completely to digital transactions, but we also need to consider the elderly among us who are not fortunate enough to have a good understanding of the digital system like we do today. Take my mom, for example. She still finds it difficult to carry out smooth transactions on her phone, so she prefers to receive money and pay her customers in cash. I also have some elderly women from whom I buy my working materials at the market, and they still struggle with the ease of digital banking. They've known me for a long time, so whenever I transfer money to them, they don't ask me to wait until they confirm the payment by reaching out to their children, who help them verify that the money has entered their accounts before they believe it. So for their sake, let the use of cash remain intact. Let things stay this way until everyone finally adapts to digital banking.
That will surely happen in the next 20 to 40 years, and by then, many of the elderly people among us today who are still struggling to use digital banking would have left this world. Anyone who still finds it difficult by that time would have no one else to blame but themselves. That sounds too harsh? Lol
Hold on, I'm a traditional man, and I don't support the idea of removing cash completely. The naira is part of our identity. I mean, not just its digital representation but the physical paper currency as well. It shouldn't be removed. Let cash remain in circulation, but let digital transactions become the dominant means of payment so that people only need to use cash once in a while.
Maybe it will eventually get to a stage where cash becomes obsolete. By then, future generations may never get to know what our paper currency looked like, just as some children born in the 2000s find it hard to believe that Nigerians once used coins as a common means of transaction.
Thanks for reading.
Photo: Own photo
