Lagos — The Nigerian Security, Printing and Minting (NSPM) has said that the machines needed to achieve some of the security features introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria in the new notes cannot be achieved in Nigeria for now.

Its Managing Director/Chief Executive, Engineer Emmanuel Ehi Okoyomon, however said the NSPM is trying to acquire the relevant technologies.

He said all the technologies need to print the enhanced security features in the N5000 proposed by the CBN can be achieved by June next year.

Engr. Okoyomon disclosed this to journalists at the 17th edition of the conference of the Association of African Banknote and Security Document Printers (ABSDP) in Lagos.

The CBN has indicated the new currency would be available by March 2013, thus going by current lack of capacity by NSPM, the new currencies may still be printed abroad except CBN would wait for NSPM to build the requisite capacity before awarding the contract.

If CBN prints abroad, Nigeria may still be losing huge capital to foreign entities in the printing of new currencies considering that the entire Nigerian bank notes would be reprinted to include more security features.

"There is a particular feature in the N5000 note and we don't have the machine to print them at the moment but I can assure you that by the middle of next year, we will have the machine that can print the N5000 note. By the middle of next year, we will have the capacity to print N5000 note in Nigeria," Engineer Okoyomon said.

On allegation that the CBN has already printed the notes, he said "it is not true that the N5000 note has been printed by the CBN."

On counterfeiting, he said "you cannot stop counterfeiting bank notes just like you cannot stop people from writing computer viruses, but it doesn't mean they would be successful," he said noting that "the police, SSS, CBN and other agencies send us huge fake currencies to analyse from time to time. But with the advent of computer, you need to change your currency from time to beat fakers."