Sierra Leone slashes ‘zeros of shame’ from banknotes

In a bid to restore confidence in the inflation-hit national currency, Sierra Leone has introduced a new family of banknotes, stripping three zeros off the Leone,

The Bank of Sierra Leone announced the move last August, saying that the public’s purchasing power would not be affected by the change.

A new note of 10 Leones is the equivalent of an old 10,000 Leones note, which changes hands for around 75 US cents.

“We have removed three zeros from our banknotes but the money yesterday is the same value as today,” President Julius Maada Bio said at ceremonies at the central bank where the new bills were unveiled.

Year-on-year inflation in the West African state was 24.87 percent in May, according to the national statistics agency.

Rising prices had driven the printing of banknotes, resulting in a mountain of paper money that is costly to sustain and unwieldly for the public.

It takes huge quantities of banknotes for Shoppers to make the littlest of purchases, and unscrupulous bank tellers sometimes pilfer notes from sealed bundles of bills.

We are removing the ‘zeros of shame’ to get the currency properly aligned,” Morlai Bangura, a central bank director said, adding that the bank had begun distributing the new paper notes to commercial banks last week.

On Friday, customers braving the rain, queued at commercial banks to swap their old banknotes for new ones.

One sierra Leonian said “The changing of our currency is necessary — we were used to carrying bags to the bank to withdraw our money, but not anymore,”

The new banknotes have a similar design to the old ones but are smaller in size.

“Our current currency is too big to fit into a wallet and we spend too much money printing oversized banknotes,” Kelfala Murana Kallon, the central bank governor, told reporters last August when he announced the move.