Nigeria’s bank-crashing billionaire cult (2)

Iwas surprised really at the emotive response in some quarters, to the first part of this article which came out last week. I thought this was an obvious, overflogged issue. But if many people expressed solidarity by being angry at what a few bankers and their billionaire friends are doing with depositors’ funds, a few people shocked me by trying to defend the indefensible. I guess that is how life is. While some are trying to promote social justice, others are proponents of social injustice. No one is asking that people not be extremely rich and to live in luxury. Only that such cannot and must not be done at the expense of innocent people.

I am however more concerned with two critical issues bothering on ideology; the first is how society sees and rewards ‘success’, and the second, what our tertiary educational institutions teach to impressionable youths. I am more concerned with the ease with which bank treasuries full of monies belonging to the hoi polloi, could be emptied in a mad frenzy by smart alecs who also complain about how bad Nigeria is.

As for the Nigerian government, it needs to ask itself some real hard questions. What does Nigeria need now? Huge, unmanageable elephant projects which keeps sucking the life out of the country’s finances by putting its banks under pressure, or fit, productive ventures which are profitable on their own and add value to the system by strengthening the banking sector? The reason we are in this position is that we have given too much credence to the former. It is all about big, big, big. Never about functionality and value-add. Some of us have been shouting about this commonsensical way of doing things, ever before Senator “Commonsense”, himself one of those who have milked the system, tried to hijack commonsense from the world! Let me hear one more nonsense about commonsense from him! Of course we fell into the trap of big is beautiful, and these smart boys simply stepped in and took us to the cleaners. The Carnegies, Rockefellers and Fords of this world did not milk American banks to death by taking unpaid loans. Instead, the proceeds of their enterprises turned American banks into global entities. In Nigeria, most of the monies that appear as bad loans today have made it to foreign countries.

The other day, the CBN under Sanusi, directed banks to start publishing the names of bad debtors. Many ‘corporate’ people criticized him, among them the advocates of mindless devaluation, who pontificate about the ‘true value of the naira’; a phenomenon they know absolutely nothing about. These are the proponents of privatization and devaluation. They know themselves. Well, the tradition of publishing the names of serial bad debtors have continued under Emefiele, with marginal success. But for someone like me, I always study the publications, so that I know who the fake guys are. I reckon a few other people will do the same.

It is important to note that the list of bad debtors being published by the banks, is different from the ones at AMCON, and both of them are different from many bad loans that the banks are patching around in their books. AMCON has not published its list of late but it will do well to apprise the public of the names of these crazy people holding our economy to ransom. Before it makes it to the newspapers, the bank just cannot help it. They try to manage these things as much as possible. It can be said that very few of the loans given by our banks make it back into their liquidity in good health. There must have been a point where it was agreed that those loans needn’t be repaid and so anyone who collected them just saw it as their own share of the national cake or something of that sort. If we are to end this, some things need be done to correct the impression that all it takes to be successful in life is access to money by hook or crook, dreams that have no basis, size for the heck of it, and the membership of some cult that promises untold wealth

As reported in the media, in the instance of Skye Bank, the names of the kingpins involved include their Chairman, Tunde Ayeni, who under Jonathan, bought up everything in sight, and reportedly has his dirty twenty fingers and paws in another nascent bank. Then there is Kola Aluko through his brother, Kunle. There is Jide Omokore or Jide Jones, who was arraigned on Friday 1st of July for duping the Federal Government of Nigeria in some crude oil deal, or millions if not billions of US Dollars. These guys are vermin. It is incredibly difficult to get rid of them. The biggest loan in AMCON - a recently revealed - is one given by First Bank Plc to Seawolf, an oil drilling company owned by one Adolor Uwamu from Delta State. The figure is anything like N85billion. The guy is ivy league trained and had worked with IBTC, Morgan Stanley and a handful of these big foreign banks. He is dapper and looks intelligent, but what we need to curb this idea where some few smart guys just walk into banks, meet with their friends and literally cart away billions that they will never repay! Other names on AMCON’s 2012 list include Zenon(Otedola), MRS Holdings (Dantata), Capital Oil (Ifeanyi Uba), Geometric Power (Barth Nnaji), PAN Auto, Arik Airlines, Aero Contractors, Rahamanniya Oil and Gas, Bi-Courtney (Babalakin), Tak Continental (whose Chairman, Thomas Etuh was curiously approved as the Chairman of Unity Bank Plc, in 2015!), among others. These are the big boys who can access the president anytime they wish. People who struggle to do honest, value-adding business will try forever. I hope some of them have resolved their loans, but certainly not all.

For me, it boils down to what is taught in business school. It boils down to the mentality we have created and the way business is understood. If we are to end this, some things need be done to correct the impression that all it takes to be successful in life is access to money by hook or crook, dreams that have no basis, size for the heck of it, and the membership of some cult that promises untold wealth.

Life has become extremely mean in Nigeria over the years. In all of these banks the careers of young people have become stagnant. New recruits spend 8 years on one level, but those who sit as EDs and MDs got promoted yearly when they were at that level. Today they have made untold amounts of money simply for packing the banks’ funds for their friends and cronies; and for themselves. They have outsourced everything as well. Business school training tells us it is better to outsource; that it is the ‘modern’ thing to do. And so, as Azu Ishiekwene rightly observed in his article last week, in many of the banks, the wives and girlfriends of the chairman or MD are the ones providing outsourcing services. When the banks pay N80,000 per staff to these companies, only N40,000 gets to the staff. Graduates are being paid N30,000 per month by these ‘banks’. No leave, no promotion, no benefits, and these outsourced staff can be ‘wasted’ at any point in time with no repercussions. Is there any justice in the world? Is Baba Buhari taking notes?

The level of wrongdoing is way too much and it cannot be ignored. These same banks cannot play the victim. And if a thorough cleanup does happen, let no one pull out the ethnic card like they did under Abacha. We know that ripping people off in the banking sector is largely a ‘southern’ crime.