Although cryptocurrency-related activities have been banned in Nigeria, A secondary school in the country says it is ready to accept crypto as a form of payment.”
A private secondary school near Kano, Nigeria, has declared it will accept cryptocurrency payments for school fees, despite the country’s central bank prohibiting financial institutions from providing services to crypto exchanges.
The director of the New Oxford Science Academy in the Kano suburb of Chiranchi, according to a Thursday report from local news site Kano Focus, will allow students to pay tuition costs in cryptocurrency.
Sabi’u Musa Haruna, who began working at the institution in 2017, has pushed the Nigerian government to embrace and regulate cryptocurrency, but he appears to be moving ahead with this current action.
“We’ve decided to accept cryptocurrency as school fees because the world today is tilting towards the system,” said Haruna. “We believe one day digital money will gain more acceptance than paper money.”
Countries such as El Salvador and Tanzania are boosting payment options for cryptocurrency consumers, according to Haruna.
Following the approval of a crypto bill, the Latin American country will begin accepting Bitcoin (BTC) as legal cash across the country on September 7.
Across the globe, Tanzania’s central bank stated today that it had started working on government guidelines that might possibly overturn the country’s crypto ban.
The school director was vague about which tokens would be accepted as payment. However, public interest in Bitcoin has often been higher in Nigeria than in other nations; according to Google Trends, the African country ranks first in BTC searches, with Austria, Turkey, and Switzerland vying for second place.
The Central Bank of Nigeria issued a directive in February prohibiting authorized financial institutions in Nigeria from providing services to crypto exchanges.
Though the policy threatened “severe regulatory sanctions” for any bank that failed to close exchange accounts, governor Godwin Emefiele clarified in March that the ban was intended to “prohibit transactions on cryptocurrencies in the banking sector,” rather than deter individuals from dealing in digital assets.
In the months following the ban, many lawmakers and persons associated to Nigeria’s central bank promoted pro-crypto sentiments.
In May, Emefiele predicted that “digital currency will come to life even in Nigeria,” and the central bank revealed intentions to implement a CBDC by 2022.
