Will Sanusi’s CBN ever be right?

A few years later, he would be appointed as Nigeria’s CBN governor, after a short stint as FBN’s MD.  His becoming an MD of First Bank itself went against the grain, for the reason stated above.  As an ex-banker myself, I know that there used to be – and still exists – ‘Ibo Banks’, ‘Yoruba Banks’, and ‘Hausa Banks’ in Nigeria.  First Bank was solidly a Yoruba bank, even though things are changing in this age of globalization.  I naturally rooted for Sanusi, and had to call off a training I was facilitating on the 3rd of June 2009, to watch, alongside my trainees, the incoming Central Bank Governor’s interview at the Senate.  Before then the rhetoric – especially from my brothers and sisters in southern Nigeria – was that another ‘cattle rearer’, who studied Sharia Law and does not know anything, was about to be installed as CBN governor by Umaru Yaradua, as another way of consolidating the Hausa/Fulani hegemony.  Hmmm. By God, I hope we get tired of that rhetoric, but not when Reuben Abati, presidential spokesman, still inserts such balderdash into his every write up!

To my delight, the Sanusi man, ‘tweeted’ like the ‘ajebota’ that he is, while he spoke in impeccable English during the Senate interview.  I didn’t even know he could speak like that!  It was then he revealed that he was a Kings College old boy, and obviously he had a lot of exposure abroad.  Wow! I beamed at my co-watchers of the interview.  This is my man!  At least he was as cerebral as the departing Charles Soludo, whose policies I found somewhat gregarious.  I did not quite believe in banking consolidation (the banks are now back to niche-playing), and I exited the banking industry just at the onset of that policy.  Banking consolidation was a policy that was in tandem with an era where the managers of the world economy felt that they had arrived, and that banks could now regulate themselves.  Needless to say, it led to banks becoming ‘Too-Big-To-Fail’, and led to a phenomenon called ‘Regulatory Capture’; a scenario where the bank regulator begins to report to the banks it is meant to regulate.

My praise for Sanusi turned into consternation when he was asked about the crazy targets that banks set for their workers (which leads to prostitution, stress and toxic working environments), and he answered that banks have a right to set targets and nothing can be done about that.  He also responded to the problem of high interest rates and bank charges by talking about the high cost of running power generating sets in the nation’s banks.  I was appalled!  So in my article in Sunday Trust after he was confirmed, titled ‘Rain Check for Sanusi Lamido’, I wrote as much and asked him to wake up and ensure those grey areas were dealt with.  Sanusi sent me a text acknowledging the article and promising to look into the areas I mentioned.  He went to work naturally – not because of my article but because he knew what he intended – and a few bank MDs who thought they were untouchable, but who had apparently lost touch with reality – lost their shirts… and their many many properties.  His favorite phrase then was “I am a risk manager, I know where the bodies are buried!’

Later on, I would unofficially avail his email address to a group of bankers who had been suspended indefinitely, in anger, over a fraud for which they were not culpable.  These kinds of suspension or even termination, happen often in the banking industry, and oftentimes, they involve the exertion of inordinate penalties on lower cadre staff, while senior staff go scot free.  They mailed Sanusi about their plight and before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’, they were recalled.  I never even spoke with him.  My respect for the man soared even further, because he has tried not to lose touch.  He reads his mails and responds as appropriate.  I see his interventions these days on some of the Nigerian listservs.  The recent one was on the N5,000 note issue, where he offered some insights.  He often gets lambasted and is called names by these listservs.  Ha, the man is perhaps the bravest public servant around.  At least he is not trying to shut himself in his ivory tower.  None of his serving colleagues bother to respond to any mails from the listservs or even offer explanations where necessary.

But certainly the man is not perfect. No one is.  The most trying period for Sanusi was perhaps his defense of this administration’s ill-advised removal of fuel subsidies in January, but even at that, unlike his colleagues who called Nigerians names – including our own Abati – Sanusi was the only one who tried to offer logical reasons.  For that he almost came under mob attack in Kano; some said that event might have informed the CBN’s ‘donation’ to the poor people of that great city.  I personally felt that he was pushed forward as the poster boy for that policy and he tried to justify it from a logical perspective.  Alas beneath the policy, a lot of fraud has now been unearthed.  See Otedola and other subsidy frauds for example.

It would come to pass that all of CBN’s policies will become more politicized than necessary.  Or rather, because of the mercurial nature of SLS, they would attract more attention than needed.  All sorts of people will join issues even on technical matters that they are incapable of understanding.  Many still see him as the representative of the much-dreaded ‘northern hegemony’, and would usually approach the policies coming out of the Central Bank, first as a ‘Sanusi’ policy, and then as a ‘religious or northern policy’.  That was the fate of the Islamic Banking brouhaha, when, despite the fact that Islamic banking is now a global phenomenon, some of our financial pundits claimed it was ‘unconstitutional’, and some approached the courts.  The Islamic Banking policy had been put in place by a “southern Christian” CBN governor, Soludo, and the Islamic Bank – Jaiz – had only met the requirements within Sanusi’s tenure.  Still, Nigerians brought the world down over the matter.  I defended that policy because I am personally aware of what banks like Standard Chartered, HSBC and Barclays are doing with Islamic Banking, even in the countries from where we obtained Christianity.  I am also aware that there is an Islamic Bank of Britain (IBB for crying out loud again! Perhaps it is owned by Babangida!), with at least one branch on Edgware Road in London, among others. More next week…