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Urhobo Historical Society |
GARLANDS FOR THE VANGUARD
NEWSPAPERS
(On Their Reports and Opinions on the Debacle at the Central Bank
of Nigeria)
By Dr. Kola Afolabi
Lagos
Was Mallam
Sanusi Lamido
Sanusi being altruistic when he let the
sledge hammer fall on five targeted banks? Was he being
patriotic when he injected N420 billion into the five banks to prevent
them from failing and causing catastrophic consequences for the
nation's economy, shareholders and depositors? Or was he pursuing a
personal vendetta and a group agenda when he sacked the five chief
executives who were his colleagues up to June 2009 with so much disdain and gusto in a
generalissimo style? For a man who is an alumnus of the famous
King.s College, Lagos, where young
Nigerian students are raised not to be
tribalistic and myopic in handling
national assignments, it was easy to want to believe that
Maliam
Sanusi could not have been motivated to
act the way he did to wrest the banks from those who were alleged to
be playing ducks and drakes with shareholders and depositors funds,
besides his sense of altruism. That belief is bound to endure with
anybody until one has access to the
March 23,d, 2009 Vanguard edition which revealed five months earlier
all that Mallam
Lamido
Sanusi was to play out on 14th
August 2009.
In the aforementioned Vanguard publication scooped by
Omoh Gabriel, the Business Editor of
The Vanguard, and his colleague,
Emeka Mamah,
the nation was alerted to some sinister moves by persons from a
certain part of Nigeria, disgruntled with the outcome of the banking
consolidation, who were bent on causing real upheaval in the banking
sector to get even with policies of our immediate past President,
Chief General Olusegun
Obansanjo. What did
Omoh Gabriel and
Emeka
Mamah reveal? How accurate were they?
They reported that:
� "Anti-consolidation forces have regrouped with the hope of
...
and forcing a takeover of top five banks in the country. How
many banks did Mallam
Sanusi take over? Five banks! After
achieving the group's aim, is it any wonder that
Sanusi was unashamedly judgmental that he
did not expect any major surprises in the remaining 14 banks that were
yet to be audited? Indeed, the chairman of one of the banks yet to be
audited played the cheer leader in London during
Sanusi's road show. How tactless and
unethical can we get?
� The grand plan by the group is to cause panic and uncertainty in
the banking industry and make the target banks look unsafe for
depositors"
Was such panic and uncertainty caused? Information now in the public
domain confirms unequivocally that the
First Bank where Mallam
Sanusi held sway as Managing Director
had a field day de-marketing selected banks, leading to panic
withdrawals by customers ofthose
banks.De - marketing is a heinous,
diabolical and unethical marketing practice, a fact which
Mallam
Sanusi admitted in his circular to his staff!
� The aim of the anti
-
consolidation forces is to cause loss of public confidence in the
banking industry and compel the Federal Government to move in by
injecting funds. Furthermore, they ultimately plan to instigate
government to take equity holdings in the targeted banks.
Mallam
Sanusi, barely two months in the saddle as
the Governor of the Central Bank, as predicted by
The Vanguard, moved in by injecting funds into the five
targeted banks with the ultimate plan to take equity holdings in the
five banks. It is also now known that an exercise had been conducted
in July to pre - select investors that would ultimately be used to re-
enter the banking industry from the back door, explaining why the CBN
Governor held a private session with investors at the end of his
recent London road show! Mahmoud Lai
Alabi, the current MD of Intercontinental
Bank, confirmed Sanusi's new investors'
goal when he was reported to have said,
"whenever it is necessary that we
can have credible investors in Intercontinental Bank, I'll not shy
away from completing the process as early as possible" The CBN advertorial of September 10, 2009 also confirmed that the
Governor explained the actions of CBN to foreign investors and
correspondent banks. So, why the subterfuge that he does not have the
sale of the banks in his agenda? If he cedes the ownership of the
banks to foreign investors, is that not tantamount to the sale of the
banks to them? CBN semantics cannot pull the wool over people's
eyes.
� Part of the plans hatched by the group is to ensure that the
incumbent Governor of the Central Bank, Professor
Chukuma Saluda, does not get a second
term.
The group was resoundingly successful in this part of their plan as
Professor Soludo did not get a second
term, notwithstanding the President's view that Professor
Soludo's tenure would
"remain sources of inspiration to
an entire generation." Elsewhere, someone with Professor
Soludo's gargantuan antecedents would be
the toast of many governments of different political persuasions:
� The plan is also
to
ensure that whatever gains consolidation recorded are discredited. it is evident that literally all the
actions of Mallam
Sanusi and his cheer leader have been
geared towards discrediting the gains of consolidation.
� Part of the game is to spread
rumours that some banks are unsound and
are on the verge of collapse. They send out text messages to
individuals and account holders passing wrong information on their
targeted banks. At the moment, the group's target is one of the
high�flying new generation banks where they have sent out several
messages.
Akingbola's
deposition in the court, now in public domain, succinctly confirms
that First Bank under Mallam
Sanusi's watch was caught with its hands
in the till, with Mallam
Sanusi asserting in a circular that he had
warned his staff to desist from such unethical
behaviour. A report in the media also
confirms that Professor Soludo had
"mediated and advised that they resolve their differences.
Sanusi visited
Akingbola in the office to make peace but
was kept waiting endlessly." It is evident that
Mallam Sanusi
Lamido
Sanusi had a personal axe to grind with
Dr. Akingbola before he became the
Governor of Central Bank. No wonder
Akingbola had to scurry away for safety!
Intercontinental Bank was certainly a highly visible, flying new
generation bank and the unethical, de-marketing tactics of First Bank
literally brought the bank to its knees, necessitating
Soludo's CBN's intervention which saved
the day. Mr. Alabi, the new helmsman at
the bank, had this to say recently about the bank:
" ...
it is a good bank. One, it has a strong brand, which is aggressively
promoted. Two, it has dedicated and highly committed staff Three,
its spread is NATIONAL (emphasis mine) and the brand acceptability
all over the country is unbelievable. Four, it has solid dedicated
products targeted at key market segments and it is obvious that
these products have strong market acceptability. "
� The Arewa Consultative
Forum(ACF) has expressed concern over
what it described as the
rapidly
deteriorating liquidity situation in the banking industry and tasked
the Central Bank
to make public information on
causes of the development as well as the scale of the crisis. Did they have inside informers? Mallam
Sanusi confirms in the aforesaid interview
with The Punch as follows,
"I have had a meeting with northerners even before I became
governor. When they said they had the Bank of the North and that
after consolidation, they lost it I said you never had Bank of the
North", implying that Mallam
Sanusi had been
cohorting with his fellow northerners over
their complaint that they had lost their Bank of the North to
consolidation. The Managing Director of Unity Bank,
Mallam
Falalu Bello, had also been reported as
presenting a paper titled
"Nigeria: One Country, Four Economies" sometime in 2008 in
which he unabashedly accused the South West and South East Regions of
the country of "controlling 94% of the country's banking assets, 88%
of insurance assets and 90% of the industrial assets and is home to
the three deep sea ports of Apapa, Tin Can
Island and Roro." Taken together it is
evident that the northerners were deeply concerned over their relative
inaction in the economy and were determined to seize the heights of
the economy by whatever means, fair or foul. So, was
Mallam
Sanusi pursuing a group agenda? No wonder
the Norhern Caucus in the House of
Representatives are backing
"Hurricane Sanusi" 100 per cent!
� Mallam
Sanusi
Lamido
Sanusi was being touted among five
northerners as the prospective governor o/the CBN.
The Kano Prince turned out to be the President's blue - eyed boy!
Vanguard's prediction was again correct.
� It is unfortunate that top five banks are the target. The banks
... are sound.
Mallam
Sanusi himself corroborates the soundness
of the five banks when he said in an interview he granted
The Punch and repeated in the August publication of the Federal
Ministry of Information and Communication
Open Government publication,
"that these banks are safe. What we have done is to take actions to
make sure that the banks are safer."
If the banks are safe, why did Malam
Sanusi rush pell-mell to inject N420
billion which the banks' Treasurers, as reported in
The Vanguard, now say they didn't actually need as much? Why
could Sanusi not take the pains to analyze
the nature of the so called non-performing loans? Would he not
have found out that the worst culprits of the so-called non-performing
loans are his masters? Fasehun, the OPC
leader asserted, and no one has contradicted him,
thalt the Federal Government is owing the
five banks N3.2 trillion! If the Federal Government
honoured its obligations effectively,
would all the hues and cries have been necessary? Was
Sanusi being driven by his inordinate
desire to deliver promptly the outcomes expected by the group?
The Vanguard
in its well considered editorial titled
"Kill Economy, Save Banks" our attention was drawn to the havoc
being wrecked on the economy by the most
unfortunate hasty actions of the CBN Governor,
Mallam Sanusi.
The outcry has been deafening, coming from all segments of the
economy: Chairman of the Economic Summit Group,
Mazi Sam
Ohuabunwa; Group Political Editor of The
Guardian, Akpo
Esajere; a Professor of Finance with the
University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa;
Fasehun, Founder and President of
Oodu'a People's Conference (OPC);
Advertising Agencies; Estate Valuers;
Shareholders' Associations; Newspaper Proprietors Association of
Nigeria, Credit crunch in the inter-bank market, Foreign banks, etc;
The Vanguard certainly deserves our garlands for its incredible
investigative journalism that exposed five months in advance the
terrible and evil plans of those who have a penchant for forcibly
seizing what belongs to others and destroying them.
The intellectual myopia exhibited by the CBN in the handling of the
contrived illiquidity of the banks is simply astonishing! When Governor
Francis Sanusi (the
Sanusi before the coming of
Soludo) edged out the chairman of one of
the five banks, now given a clean bill of health by the
Mallam Lamido
Sanusi (remember that he was the Risk
Manager at the bank), for unethical conduct, no one felt the whimper
of his actions. When Professor
Soludo eased out some tin gods of some
private banks, it was achieved without any perturbations to the
economy. So, why couldn't the Prince of Kano resort to such subtle and
adroit moves? Why the grandstanding? Why was it necessary to hug the
klieg lights when handling such a highly sensitive matter that would
hurt the economic arteries of the nation? We recommend that
Mallam
Sanusi should read the" Mischievous Dog"
in Aesop & the CEO so that next time he can follow
due process whenever he wishes to use his enormous powers of sacking
bank executives. We now run the grave risk of destroying through our
military leadership style our macroeconomic reputation which the
Global Economic Forum recently lauded as the nation's key strength,
ranking Nigeria in the 20th position out of 134 nations on
this factor of global competition. Why destroy the edifice so well put
together by Prof. Chukuma
Soludo and Dr. (Mrs.)
Ngozi Okonjo
Iweala?
Mallam
Sanusi made mountain out of the use of
extensive resort to the "Expanded Discount Window" in his
televised outing as a major reason for sacking the five executives of
the banks and injecting the whopping N420 billion into the banks. In a
recently paid advert placed in many newspapers the CBN asserted that,
"The CBN Act empowers the CBN to manage money supply in the economy
through different mechanisms. The CBN, as banker to other banks, has
been increasing money supply by lending money to the banks through the
Expanded Discount Window (EDW) and the injection of the N420 billion
into the five banks is SIMILAR ( Emphasis mine) to that function.
" SO
WHY DID SANUSI DELIBERATELY CLOSE THE EDW IF IT IS SIMILAR TO THE
FUND INJECTION??
Who in Nigeria or abroad had bothered about the goings on in the EDW
which his immediate predecessor had quietly and sensibly created to
deal with the aftermaths of the global meltdown?
Ifthe funds withdrawn from the EDW are
loans, didn't they have repayment terms and
duration? Why did Sanusi deliberately
disrupt that seamless mechanism simply to achieve his goal of
presenting the five TARGETED banks as distressed and ready for take
over? If they were obtaining funds from that source, surely that must
mean they were positioned to meet their obligations to their customers
as and when due. There was no known case that any of the five banks
was unable to discharge its obligations before
Sanusi, the best Risk Manager in Africa,
decided to ambush the banks to take them over.
Another grave harm Mallam
Sanusi may unwittingly be sowing is the
destruction of the entrepreneurial spirit of Nigerians. Among the four
founding fathers of Intercontinental Bank -- ENUHA, ALABI, OBIERI and
AKINGBOLA -- we have an entrepreneur par excellence. Engineer
Enuha, a 1974 University of Rochester
first class Chemical engineer and an
MSc Cornell University graduate has, with
exemplary integrity, contributed most creditably to the progress and
advancement of Nigeria in many ways. He has trained and inspired a
whole generation of Nigerian engineers who have distinguished and are
still distinguishing themselves in Shell, Mobil, Texaco and Elf
Petroleum. His company which he founded at the youthful age of 27 with
Mr. Chris Alabi has become the Bechtel of
Nigeria: the company has engineered, constructed, installed and
commissioned petroleum products loading facilities for OBAT Petroleum,
Petroleum loading depots, constructed fire water tanks, LPG spheres
etc. Engineer Enuha, is one of the leading
voices of local content development in the Oil and Gas Sector and has
contributed in no small measure to the existence of the Organization
of Design Engineers of Nigeria (OGDEN). Generous to a fault, he does
not believe that life is worthwhile unless it is lived for others. He,
Alabi,
Obieri and
Akingbola have built Intercontinental Bank
over the past 20 years to the enviable state that has made it the
first target of those who want to seize the economic purse strings of
the nation.
It is trite knowledge that any board of directors anywhere in the
world is as good as the materials management decides to tender before
it. Akingbola, as the chief executive
among the four of the founding fathers from the inception of the bank
bears the greatest responsibility for the performance of the bank. It
is doubtful that any of these gentlemen, particularly
Akingbola who has been in banking all of
his adult life, and whose middle name is
Bankole, would have knowingly and
deliberately run their bank, which is one of their most important life
investment, to the abyss as now asserted by
Mallam Sanusi.
Let Mr. Akingbola evince courage by coming
out of hiding to face his accusers and traducers to clear his name and
enhance the release of his respectable colleagues from the EFCC Black
Hole of Calcutta. Dr. Raymond Obieri,
Chief Samuel Adegbite (who turned around
Wema Bank and was an astounding CEO) Mr.
Chris Alabi, Engineer Hyacinth
Enuha, Chief
Sanni Adams,
Alhaji Isyaka
Umar
(a Kano Prince), all senior citizens, do not at all deserve the
unfortunate humiliation to which EFCC has subjected them to for the
past weeks by holding them hostage because Dr.
Akingbola fled from the battle field. They
are some of the finest Nigerians this nation can boast of.
Signed:
Dr. Kola Afolabi,
Medical Director,
Ago - Medical Centre
Okota, lsolo
Lagos