Across Africa, celebrating with cash has become a crime. Tanzania punishes defacement of the currency under section 332A of the Penal Code. Kenya polices it under section 367 of its Penal Code and has just warned the public against money bouquets. In Nigeria, people have gone to jail for spraying naira, most famously Bobrisky, sentenced to six months in 2024.

The stated logic is sound. Currency must be durable, and abuse leads to premature withdrawal and replacement of notes at real cost to the public. But before we send more wedding guests to court, the practice deserves a behavioural lens.

Money is a bundle of characteristics, and some of them contradict one another. Untraceability works against anti-money-laundering compliance. Reversibility and local verifiability come at the expense of latency and finality. Central banks accept that designing money means striking balances between conflicting properties. Durability against usability should be treated the same way.

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As a medium of exchange, money runs on reputation, and reputation is built on trust. When a currency loses stability, it loses reputation, and people quietly switch to alternatives. That is how countries get dollarised. What the durability debate forgets is that trust has a cousin, and that cousin is pride. Pride in a currency is built not only on stability but also on the freedom people enjoy in using it.

Psychology of celebration

Here is the point the regulators miss. Nobody throws money they are not proud of. In Tanzania, people throw the 10,000-shilling note, the highest denomination, affectionately nicknamed Shuka la Masai, not the 1,000. Throwing it is a display of confidence in the note itself.

The greater the freedom to use money, the more confident and prouder its holders become. Criminalise that pride, and you teach people to celebrate with someone else’s currency.

This behavioural pride extends to banking as well. People take pride in the reputation of their bank and the number of accounts they hold. In the hip-hop song What’s the Difference, Xzibit boasts, “I got five bank accounts.” Even in more cashless societies, people find behavioural ways of taking pride in the money they have.

The United States shows a smarter design. 18 U.S. Code § 333 prohibits defacing dollars, but only with “intent to render the note unfit to be reissued.” That single phrase is why Fat Joe and Lil Wayne faced no legal trouble for their Make It Rain video. Throwing money in the air shows intent to display pride, not intent to deface or perforate. The law targets the harm, not the celebration.

To be clear, I am not arguing that throwing money is logical. I am only arguing that, in classical economic thinking, human beings are rational, and this behaviour carries meaning. Nor am I defending genuinely destructive acts. Pinning and glueing notes into flower bouquets or stepping on bills damages currency. Tossing a note into the air does not spoil it.

Awareness over arrests

If durability is the true concern, everyday habits do far more damage than any ceremony. Folding a note twice over and stuffing it into a tiny jeans pocket destroys more bills than a season of weddings. The answer is awareness, not arrests. The Bank of Tanzania is already educating the public on handling money, and that is the right instrument.

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Regulators must strike a balance. Keep the educational campaigns and punish deliberate destruction, but stop turning celebrants into criminals. Otherwise, trending send-off ceremonies become nothing more than a supplier of criminals. The pride people take in the shilling, the very thing a central bank should want, becomes the offence itself.

While moving to a cashless society has benefits, people will always find ways to display their wealth. It is a show-off, yes. But let us look at the positive side of things and increase people’s freedom. An economy succeeds when people use money freely. If people were strictly economically logical, the system would collapse. People need to be free.

Francis Nyonzo is a Fulbright Alumnus, an economist and theorist whose research interests span the digital economy, development economics, social justice, and human rights. He is available at francisnyonzo@gmail.com. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.