CBN to release New Smaller Demoninations in Paper before December
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Friday declared that new smaller denomination notes made of Paper and not Polymer will be in circulation before December.
This was disclosed by Tunde Lemo, the Deputy Governor, Operations, while he briefed newsmen at the Annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
He said,“The smaller denomination notes are being supplied by the printers and before December, you will no longer see tattered notes all over.As I said, I have apologised to 
Nigerians that the reason we had old notes that are still in circulation was because of the issues around Project Cure.
“We had earlier thought last year that we will transmit to a better note family which we code-named Project Cure.But because of the issues around N5,000 notes and the resentments of changing the N5, N10 and N20 to coins, we had to go back to the drawing board and that was what has caused the delay.”
According to him, the new smaller denominations will be in paper form with their features.
“They will be on paper since we didn’t succeed in convincing Nigerians that those smaller denominations should be in coins.But there will be a time in the future when we will all understand why they have to be coined.
“But now, we are back to status quo ante; that is they will reappear in the old form that they were except that they are going to be in paper not polymer”, Lemo added.
Lemo also said that expenditure on currency notes has been on the decline since 2009 as the CBN has been printing more quantities of higher denominations.
“We used to spend N13 printing N1000 notes, if we had succeeded in printing N5,000 notes, we would have spent only N18; that meant that would have also reduced the cost of printing.That was the message we were trying to transmit to Nigerians.”
Regarding why the CBN was changing the form of lower denomination prints from Polymer to Paper,the deputy governor said,“We would have spent less printing polymer because polymer substrate lasts four times longer than paper and it costs only 150 per cent more.
“Unfortunately, whereas the substrate lasts four times longer, the ink fades pretty faster and so what’s the use of the substrate whose ink has faded and that was partly why we disengaged from polymer.”