The jury is still out on what motivated the recent “operation sweep” hatched by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Lamido Sanusi. Some of his critics insist that the new CBN governor was propelled by some wretched ethno-religious interests rather than broad regulatory, even patriotic zeal. His critics are yet to get very strong and broad public approval of their judgemental dismissal of what looks like a necessary assault on the creative destruction of the nation’s banking system.
While the debate remains alive, last week, Sanusi again swept off another set of directors in three additional banks. You could ask why he did not wait to complete the audit in all the banks before acting, but knowing the strength of the politics and pressures that surround semi-revolutionary actions in Nigeria’s public life, you could forgive the man for carrying out an urgent carpet bombing before sending the ground forces in. In military logic, this is one of the most potent means of demoralizing the enemy.
But we are not in a military terrain here – or so we must assume. This is about financial matters that sit at the very heart of our collective economic well-being as a nation. But for those of us who never understood the logic that propelled many of the financial processes ascendant in the pre-Sanusi banking system which hardly seemed like an improvement over their ancient money-changing predecessors in Florentine banks in Renaissance Italy – from where the word “bank” evolved – there is not much surprise that a “tsunami” had to come.
However, much of the debates of the Sanusi assault on the casino logic which the Nigerian financial players have imposed on postcolonial capitalism carry political undertones. Even though we have had limited technical analyses on the pros and cons, we are yet to see the consequences of these weighty actions. But most Nigerians forget in their responses to these reforms that we have been here before.
During the General Abacha and President Obasanjo years there were similar attempts to clean up the banks. The Failed Banks phenomenon under Abacha swept so many prominent bank executives into jail, while some fled into exile for the rest of the period that the despicable soldier was in town. Forget that Abacha was “failing” the Central Bank and, as later discovered, looting it dry, the general could not stand by and watch the lottery that many bankers and other financial pimps had turned the banking sector into. But once Abacha danced Indian Waka off the stage, the logic of the casino returned to govern the banks.
As a financial neophyte who has not learnt how to turn even his monthly wages into sufficient means of livelihood, yours truly had always wondered how banks could be doing so well, buying private jets for their directors, for instance, in a depressed economy. Then came the reforms engineered by the EFCC under Nuhu Ribadu. The first person that was put to the sword, literally, to show that evils of “casino capitalism”, was Shettima Mohammed Bulama, the MD of Bank of the North. Ribadu put the man who was turning the bank into a Bank of the NOT in handcuffs and got him convicted. He also went after several other bank directors who couldn’t differentiate between their personal pockets and depositors’ money.
This was the background to the consolidation project spear-headed by Governor Charles Soludo. Pre-consolidation, everyone had a bank. Never mind that the same people who profited from the casino capitalism that was ascendant in Nigeria “invested” in the banks in the consolidation era – including rogue governors, overnight billionaire whose only claim to entrepreneurial brilliance was their connection to Aso Rock, and other political prostitutes who had spare keys to our national treasury. But, at least, the banks were “consolidated”.
As we have since learnt, the logic of casino capitalism has the proverbial nine lives. Kill it now; it rises in new forms tomorrow. Perhaps what this should say to Sanusi and other reform-minded upholders of emergent postcolonial capitalism is that the problem lies elsewhere. If you don’t undertake a fundamental restructuring of the state, you cannot solve critical problems which are manifestations of the total social composition of power. Tomorrow, Sanusi will be either pushed out, as Ribadu was before him; or the logic of the casino will overpower and overtake his reform-minded CBN - such that even his Shariah-banking wish would be incapable of surmounting the challenges of a national economy founded on the logic of grand larceny.
But this is no dismissal of the limited efforts in the different segments of our national life to change things for the better. Yet, Sanusi should ponder this: is there no link between the “liberal” attitudes of the sacked bank executives to the movement and exchange of cash and credit and the seemingly limitless billions that make the rounds among politicians – some of which are used to abrogate the electorate during “elections”?
So, let Sanusi watch his back. He can squeeze the liquidity of the criminally affluent now, but they are waiting, in turn, to liquidate his squeeze. President Umaru Yar’Adua seems pleased with Sanusi today, but given that the CBN boss acts and sounds like nobody’s fool, the thieving vampires who got the president into office and whose backs he watches daily may soon have him move against the nation’s rampaging chief banker. When the rapacity that drives casino capitalism manages to come round Sanusi’s reforms, the CBN governor, rather that Erasmus Akingbola, may be the one fighting extradition.
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