Praise singers in Kano state, known as “maroka” in Hausa parlance have resorted to using POS to collect money from public in the wake of naira scarcity in the country.
BizPoint reports that praise singing is one of the ancient Hausa traditional businesses where people praise people, especially rich, at ceremonies using oratory lyrics to arouse one’s pride to give them gift in cash or in kind.
However, the lingering scarcity of cash has affected the praise singers in Kano, the commercial nerve centre of Northern Nigeria.
According to them, the naira swap policy had affected their business negatively as people hide under the guise of “no cash” to stop giving them money at events.
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They lamented that the situation had inflicted hardship on them as most of them could not even feed their family.
“We are bearing the brunt of this naira swap. We have understood that people are hiding this cash crunch situation to refuse to give us money,” said one of the leaders of press singers in Kano, Alasan Sankira Fanshekara.
“If we go to an event, especially wedding fatiha, we will come home with nothing as people would be telling us no cash or we should give our account numbers. If you give thee account number, you will not receive the alert.
“The situation had affected our business negatively. We are suffering because most of us can not feed their family.
“Unlike before, if there is a wedding, we would go back home with decent cash in our pockets. Unfortunately this situation is unbearable,” he lamented.
“We are now thinking of introducing POS to be collecting the money instantly from people. With hunger in our stomach, we even find it difficult to raise our voices to praise sing people.
“I appeal to general public to consider our plight to be patronizing our POS,” Fanshekara appealed.
