NIGERIA CENTRAL ABNK PRESIDENT AND 5 BANK CEOSs AT WAR IN NIGERIA.

There were mistakes made, like all humans. As analyzed by the great banker and entrepreneur, Atedo Peter side, in a text he sent to me last Saturday: “The sad truth is that, anywhere in the world, relying continuously on liquidity support from your regulator (Central Bank of Nigeria in this case) as a ‘lender of last resort’ is a dangerous game. If the ‘game’ continues for too long, your ‘liquidity’ problem will become synonymous with insolvency and as CEO of that institution you become very vulnerable because the regulator will inevitably wield his axe someday”. He is right.But I insist that Sanusi, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, went overboard and certainly beyond his mandate. He apparently did not weigh his hasty actions against the general interest of our country as well as the historical dialectics of our nation. He would have realized the problems of Nigeria were far greater than that of those five bank executives. Scapegoatism has never worked in Nigeria. He should look back at the recent past when a few governors were being impeached in the middle of the night. And some Nigerians hailed the action. I will continue to say that we can’t set a whole village on fire just to catch a few rats. What have we gained in concrete terms? Nothing drastic has been done to investigate and prosecute the former President, the multitude of governors, ministers, legislators (States and Federal) special advisers, board members, and others who have served these past ten years. The same fate shall befall this crusade. I have three reasons for my assertion. The present composition, and the very origin, of this administration, makes it impossible for any meaningful war to be fought and won. The second is that only a benevolent and visionary dictator, and clear-headed revolutionaries, can truly fight the cancer that corruption has become in Nigeria, because nearly everyone is guilty. Even the elder statesman, Alhaji Maitama Sule said that much last week.
My third theory is that the likes of Nuhu Ribadu, Nasir el-Rufai, Oby Ezekwesili, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi and company, would only be able to push their revolutionary ideas when they are able to acquire executive powers at the very top. The Nigerian State is run by a few oligarchs who are intricately intertwined, and too difficult to disentangle. Sanusi would soon be frustrated like Ribadu.I believe Sanusi was too much in a haste to show his bite. If he was not in a hurry, he would have audited all the banks at once. And award penalties without favour or discrimination. The criminalization of a few people, when less than half of the banks have been audited is, to say the least, reckless and disastrous. There was no indication that he spent sufficient time with the indicted MDs to pursue the possibility of redemption. The same Sanusi who told us at home that he would give the banks back to their owners if they can meet some stringent conditions went abroad to gleefully announce that the banks were up for sale. He must have been encouraged by the applause he got from the kill-and-go choir.What stopped Sanusi from publishing the complete list of all debtors in all the banks? Why didn’t he throw all these debtors into jail the same way he dealt with the Bank MDs? Why is the Federal Government diverting our attention from the lack of progress in the investigation and prosecution of so many members of its ruling party? And in truth, it is an established fact that the government is a pathological debtor, and one of the veritable sources of the huge debt portfolio of some of the banks and businesses. Why did we not adopt the less destructive measures of the Americans?The global economic crisis was largely due to the subprime mortgage lending fiasco of the US economy, where banks greedily invested their deposits as loans to the mortgage sector. This was the same way our Nigerian banks made the terminal mistake of over-exposing themselves to the Stock Market. The higher the return in any business, the higher the risk. The crisis in America nearly wiped out the capital base of some of the biggest financial icons, such as Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sach. Also, top European Banks like UBS, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and Barclays were affected.Their home governments rose to the challenges by rolling out workable packages, under strict terms, but without our own theatre of the absurd. Foreigners were not invited to take over the banks, and their assets were not sold off, like it is being threatened in Nigeria. Those foreign banks have since recovered and are bouncing back to profitability, in an atmosphere devoid of rancor and gangsterism. Finally, I'm not a lawyer, but I have a fair knowledge of Jurisprudence. There are three principles that we must consider. The first is NEMO JUDEX IN CAUSA SUA (A man shall not be a judge in his own cause). It is difficult to see Sanusi as a total and unbiased umpire.
The second is NEMO DAT QUOD NON HABET (You can’t give out what you don’t own!), which is what Sanusi has done by sacking the MDs. And by dishing out their banks to outsiders of his choice, without making recommendations to their board, or giving them warnings and deadlines; by harassing them and their homes with forces of coercion, by freezing their personal accounts, by publishing confidential bank statements of clients etc, he has already convicted them! The damage is total and almost irreversible in a country like ours, even if any of them is cleared tomorrow. In fact, what Sanusi has breached is the third principle of AUDI ALTERAN PARTEM RULE (The right to fair-hearing) , and some of us are too forward-looking to allow such lawlessness to stick. Sanusi has combined the duties of a Complainant, Prosecutor, Advocate for the Prosecutor, Star witness, the Bailiff, and the Gaoler. It is very tragic.