By Ashemiriogwa Emmanuel
The long-awaited electronic currency under the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), eNaira, was officially launched on Monday, October 25, 2021, by President Muhammadu Buhari.
This unveiling was done by the President before he jetted out of the country for a summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He was accompanied by the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr Godwin Emefiele, and other government officials and private business persons.
The mobile app for operating the digital national legal tender with the theme Same Naira, More Possibilities was made available to Nigerians for use as it became activated and downloadable from Google Play Store, IOS Store, with the name eNaira Speed Wallet app.
With excitement, many Nigerians went ahead to download and install the mobile app, particularly from the play store, expecting to make financial transactions across the country using their mobile devices.
Thankfully, the digital distribution service where the eNaira app can be downloaded gave users the platform to express their views, opinions, and experiences while using the application.
A look at the review section on Google Play Store at the time of writing this report showed that the eNaira app had been aggregately rated 1.9 out of 5 stars by Nigerians, with the majority of reviews giving one-star ratings.
While some were happy with the user interface, it was observed that many users complained of the issues experienced during registration, including the request for user’s email address linked with Bank Verification Number (BVN).
This was a challenge given that many Nigerians do not have this integrated yet, and might have to go to the bank to fix this to use the app.
In other popular scenarios, after inputting all the required data correctly, users are left to watch the screen display a spinning icon until it eventually reads, “there was an error, try again.”
In the case of a particular user, Mr Raphael Awoseyin, he wrote, “I couldn’t even register. When I submit all the information, it goes into a spin and tells me there was an error, without telling me what it was.
“I knew I submitted all the information correctly, after several attempts, it told me I had made too many attempts with the same BVN.”
The CBN, via its Google Play account, was able to respond to some of these concerns, directing them to contact [email protected] to share their complaints.
The CBN made it clear that the system locks out users who repeatedly attempt prompts during registration but unlocks them after 30 minutes.
As of writing, which is over 48 hours after it became active, the app has over 100,000 downloads and about 2,000 organic reviews on Google Play Store, while the eNaira Speed Merchant Wallet has recorded over 10,000 downloads and 71 reviews and a rating of 2.7.
Dipo Olowookere 
Adedapo Adesanya