Laws that don’t bite

To my mind, Nigeria has one of the best policies on paper with aim/intent to protect and promote the lives and welfare of its citizens when compared to other African countries.

The laws required to make life better for every Nigerian have already been passed by several legislative houses from the 1st Senate to date. However, many citizens don’t realize these facts because the system lacks the adequate structures to enforce the policies and make them a reality for the people.

In Nigeria, service providers are kings as opposed to the customer. Customers in Nigeria spend their money based on the dictates of the service providers regardless of satisfaction derived or not. These service providers, i.e the information and communications providers, financial institutions and the like, collect huge sums of money from Nigerians on a daily basis without effective regulatory or supervisory framework to check their excesses.

The financial institutions in Nigeria are regulated by the Banks and Other Financial Institutions Act (BOFIA) which provides for banking business, duties of banks, supervision, restrictions, prohibition and the like. The Central Bank of Nigeria Act provides for the control and administration of monetary and banking policies of the Federal Government both within and outside Nigeria, while the Insurance Act, is an Act to regulate insurance business in the country, and to provide for other matters connected therewith.

Despite the beautiful provisions of this Act, our Financial Institutions still operate unchecked to the detriment of the customers they ought to serve. Take for instance, by the law of banking in Nigeria, once a bank has changed the status of a customer by presenting an account balance belonging to such customer, the customer cannot be held liable for acting on such representation.

In layman’s terms, let’s say a customer gets a credit alert of N20,000 (twenty thousand naira only) from his/her bank on payment of an unknown and unexpected source, and such customer acting on the credit alert goes to the ATM and makes withdrawal of the money, if it happens that the credit alert is as a result of a bank employee in carrying out his/her teller duties mistakenly pays a wrong customer, the customer ought not to be held liable for the negligence of the bank.

Unfortunately in Nigeria, a bank would send credit alert to the mobile phone of a customer, then hold the customer responsible for acting on the representation of the alert, this translates to the banks holding the customer responsible for the mistake committed by an employee of the bank, and the system gives a blind eye to such unnecessary and untold hardship on the customer. To make matters worse, the current system allows the bank to employ the services of security agencies to harass such customer.

Customers get deductions from their airtime without explanation from service providers; banks make unexplainable withdrawals to the discomfort of the customers and the system does not seem to be concerned. A customer would have N1000 in his/ her bank statement, then go to the bank ATM to make withdrawal after payment of transport, but be told insufficient balance (it is not like our ATMS dispense denominations other than N500, & N1000).

With due respect to all concerned, but it seems to this writer that the financial institutions in Nigeria are operated to take money from the customers, rather than provide financial solutions.

The Nigerian Legal System, in order to protect the citizens from acts like this, provided federal agencies like the Consumer Protection Council, Servicom and the like to checkmate these service providers, sadly they don’t bite hard enough to protect the Nigerian customer.

This is just few in many instances where provisions of the Laws of the Federation are ignored by citizens, business organisations, government agencies, etc in their daily interactions with the Nigerian society; because the machineries put in place to ensure the enforceability of these provisions lack the teeth to bite. These same Nigerians when they travel outside the shores of this country, adhere strictly to the laws of those other countries down to traffic rules, yet when they come back home, they blatantly disregard the provisions of our laws. And someone said ‘charity begins at home’.

Godspeed!

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