It has come
to the time of the year when I can pack up and shut up shop for a month or
two.
School is out for summer and I fly
to Scotland on Monday night (via Italy for a week – yippee).
I have
grown to love Lagos but I need regular breaks.
I reckon I get to about three months before the hassle of Naija life
starts to irritate me and I have to get out.
In the countdown to flying out, my lack of patience really begins to
show. Regular day to day chores, like
going to the bank, become perilous missions of tightrope tensions and frazzled
nerves.
The banking
system in Nigeria is like most government regulated systems here – fragmented,
slow, unnecessarily bureaucratic and incredibly frustrating. On Friday, I went to the bank to withdraw all
of my naira in order to take it to an exchange office and, eventually, to the UK. (You may be thinking this is odd but the bank
not only charge me an outrageous amount of money to make an international
payment, but also do not offer any kind of currency exchange.)
While waiting I remember I cannot use my bank
card to withdraw cash inside the bank (you can only do that at a cash machine)
so I set about writing myself a cheque to cash.
I do this inside Zenith bank – which is a bit like Gringotts bank from
Harry Potter. You wait in a queue but
often a security officer will come and ask you what you are doing and if you
are taking out enough money he will usher you through to the back of the bank
where you enter a room full of money and cash counting machines!!!
Anyway on Friday
this is, indeed, what happened. I handed
over my cheque and awaited my bag of money.
You end up with bags of money because the largest note in Nigeria is
1000 Naira – the equivalent of £4. You
can imagine what a few thousand pounds looks like! Half way through this process the teller says
‘ Madam, you know you will be charged for withdrawing all this at the same
time.’ I’m not surprised because they
charge for EVERYTHING at Zenith so I casually ask how much. The amount angers me so much that I jump off
my seat and rush back through to the ‘normal’ banking area. They are trying to charge me almost £50 to
withdraw my own cash!! Not transfer, not
break an ISA agreement, and not take all my savings but to simply withdraw my
own cash from my own current account.
After a
good twenty minutes of heated discussions with various members of staff and
exasperations from me I decide to withdraw less money to avoid the charge. The funniest thing is the reason given for
the charge is that they are trying to discourage people lifting large sums of
money and encouraging a cashless system where we all use our cards at POS. This sounds great BUUUUUUUUUUUUT none of the
POS systems work in Lagos, they block the card when I try to use it abroad AND
there is a very low cap on the amount you can withdraw at a cash point.
Eventually
I get my cash and go to meet the dodgy money exchange man. Now, please bear in mind, my friend called
this dude earlier in the day, negotiated a price and told him how much I was
bringing. She also arranged a time to
meet at his ‘office’. I turned up in my
school clothes and high heels with my bag full of money. Not my best security decision! He wasn’t ready, he didn’t have enough
sterling, his office was a filing cabinet, a calculator, a safe and two upside
down beer crates as seating.
After half an hour of waiting for more sterling
to show up I lost it at this dude too!
‘Why lie?’
I screech! ‘Don’t tell me you have
something you don’t.’ He looks at me
bemused and says . . . . . . . that old chestnut . . . . . . . . . . you
guessed it . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Sorry Ma’.
And then he goes back to playing on his phone.
In the end
the bags of money were changed for a small envelope of notes. It is safe to say I cannot wait to get on the
plane and recharge the old batteries at home.
Scotland isn’t perfect but I need to be in a place where banks, shops,
airports simply work and function and provide a decent service.
I’ll be able to cope better in September when
I return.
No comments:
Post a Comment