By Demilade Adewale
Commercial activities were on Tuesday paralysed in Sango -Ota in Ado-Odo/Ota local government area of Ogun State, as residents trooped out to protest the lingering scarcity of the new naira notes of N200, N500, and N1000.
Residents who had been going to banks for cash withdrawal, said they could not access their money.
They were said to have become agitated when the commercial banks refused to accept the old naira notes as deposits.
Vanguard gathered that the protesters barricaded the Joju junction of the Idiroko-Ota road, causing heavy gridlock.
With bonfires on the road, the protesters castigated the President Muhammadu Buhari-led government, accusing the All Progressives Congress (APC) of inflicting hardship on the masses.
It would be recalled that there was a violent protest in Abeokuta, the state capital last week, in which some banks were attacked and one person shot.
In a related development, fish sellers in Abeokuta, staged a protest on the rejection of the old naira notes by commercial banks and business owners in the state.
Vanguard reliably gathered that the refusal of banks, filling stations and supermarkets in the State to accept the old notes, had affected small and medium scale businesses in the state as the new notes were nowhere to be found.
On Wednesday, market women lamented their inability to buy goods due to the enforcement of the cashless policy by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Crying and shouting on top of their voices, the women decried the CBN policy, which they said has caused them hardships.
The traders said the rejection of the old naira notes by wholesalers at various ‘cold rooms’ has made them jobless.
Speaking on behalf of the fish sellers, Mrs Rasheedat Oyebola, said: “We have tried all we could but to no avail, that is why we have decided to go round the town to explain our plights to Nigerians so the CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele can have mercy on us".
“Some of us here today are single parents and we have been struggling all our lives. If the money we have are refused as legal tender, some of us may die of hunger and poverty
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