The quest by the Nigerian central bank to create a digital currency backed by the country’s currency, the enaira has hit a bottleneck as users complained that the enaira platform was inefficient.
The Nigerian president, Mohammed Buhari recently launched the country’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) the eNaira. But things seem not to be working well judging from the poor review that users submitted on Google Play store over the performance of the CBDC app on the app hosting platform.
President Buhari launched the enaira app on Monday, October 26 amidst anticipation that the project would boost online payment within the country.
eNaira app received a one-star rating on Google Playstore from over 50 percent of its reviewers within 24 hours of launch.
One-star rating is “very bad” the list rating an app can get.
— Uneku “Clark Kent” 20/10/20 (@UnekuE) October 28, 2021
Reviews submitted by users of the enaira app shows that it was rated 2.0 star prior to being pulled down by Google. This was after the governor of Nigeria’s central bank Mr Emiefele said that dozens of banks were collaborating on the enaira platform which already signed up 2000 users before it was pulled down.
The setbacks on the Nigerian quest for a digital currency occurred despite the assurance by the country’s apex bank that it had generated 500 million naira to be dispensed via the platform that was promoted to be free to use for 90 days. This meant that there would be no transaction fees charged for users until January of February 2022.
As at the time of filing this report, the app was still available for download on Apple store, although it is not yet certain if it would remain considering the bad publicity due to poor reviews.
