About N258 million will be squeezed out of Nigerians monthly as Network providers began to charge N6.98 for every Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) bank transactions.

According to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s e-payment statistics report for January – August, 2020, not less than 292,969,790 transactions were carried out with USSD.

This translates to an average of 36,621,224 transactions monthly. Based on this breakdown, the volume of monthly transactions with the USSD has been estimated to be 36 million monthly.

With the sum of N6.98 being charged per transaction, not less than N258 million would be realised to settle part of the N42 billion banks owe telcos.

Why CBN and NCC agree to force Nigerians to pay the debt is bewildering. Despite the agitations by Telcos to charge banks and not its users because it is rendering the service to the banks.

Beyond reasonable doubt, this is a cruel move by the apex bank and NCC aimed at strengthening the financial distress many Nigerians face with enormous bank charges deducted from their accounts.