Why President Tinubu Must Sack Shonubi, Flush Out The Central Bank Of Nigeria And Overhaul The Banking Sector Immediately!

By

JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

My President, let our starting point today be a most grotesque wickedness that millions of our compatriots have been suffering at the hands of the banks in this country.

FAILED AND UNREVERSED DEBITS
I can’t count the number of people I personally know who have stopped using certain banks because of multiple failed electronic transactions wherein their accounts were debited without reversals!

We now basically have banks behaving like full-blown criminal organisations in this country, Mr President.

Quite a few people have had such experiences from multiple institutions.

This is not something in any way isolated; personally, it has happened to me, to family, friends, colleagues, to my gateman, my driver, my housekeeper, my cook and various other persons close to me!

It is in short a most horrible cancerous pandemic and just as disruptive, disgusting and unacceptable as the subsidy scam we were put through for many years in this country until you were bold and forthright enough to put an end to the utter madness.

There is no guarantee that if you go to a branch of your bank, fill a form and wait for the prescribed time, you will get your money back!

The customer care staff of the bank, who clearly know exactly what their institutions are up to, simply allow you go through the motions of filling out forms, confident that if you don’t end up seeing your money, you’ll get tired of complaining and eventually give up on getting it back!

It is that bad, my President!

We are effectively beginning to be made to look like a nation of crooks where even banks, institutions whose very existence is predicated on trust, are actively stealing depositors funds!

THIEVES MASQUERADING AS BANKERS!
It is no longer enough for Nigerian banks to fleece our citizens by imposing all manner of crooked and patently illegal charges on their accounts in cahoots with the Central Bank of Nigeria – my President, Nigerian banks, in connivance with the Central Bank, are now simply debiting their customers and stealing their money wholesale!

I was quite elated when a court fined one of the banks a considerable sum of money recently with respect to failed electronic transactions of a customer but the bitter truth is that such failed transactions and, worst of all, failure (actually refusal) of banks to reverse debits to customers’ accounts is an ongoing malfeasance that millions of Nigerians are increasingly being subjected to by their bankers!

We simply cannot have a country where bankers behave like common criminals stealing depositors funds with truly infuriating impunity!

This is a most satanic trend that became far more rampant under Godwin Emiefele as Central Bank Governor and sources in the banking industry finger him as part of the insanity.

YOU MUST DO SOMETHING DRASTIC IMMEDIATELY!
It is your obligation, my President, to immediately call the banks to order, get the Central Bank to clamp down on the abomination of banks stealing customers’ funds, ensure a system that independently tracks absolutely all electronic transactions and ensures failed debits are timeously reversed, and, and, insist that absolutely every failed transaction that has occurred thus far is fully accounted for with reversals to customers.

Indeed, my President, you must beam a scorching searchlight on the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, as well as on the telecoms companies who all seem to be in bed with the banks and the CBN in this utter perfidy!

As for the Consumer Protection Council, it is a complete disgrace and needs to be immediately overhauled to actualize its mandate.

WE SIMPLY CANNOT CONTINUE LIKE THIS!
The Chairman of the National Deposit Insurance Corporation, NDIC, recently made a video wherein he accused the Central Bank of shutting down salvageable financial institutions in decidedly questionable circumstances and effectively stealing investors and depositors funds in these banks!

Needless to say, as many bankers and regulators found guilty of involvement in the continuing madness should be railroaded to jail.

We simply cannot be a nation where the impression is given that we are all just a bunch of thieves or that ours is a gangsters paradise of a country where the notion keeps being reinforced that absolutely no entity, human or corporate, including banks, of all instructions, can be trusted.

These failed transactions are becoming ever more rampant and are being perpetrated by old and new generation banks including the new mainly virtual banks that have become more popular since Emiefele’s naira redesign insanity was unleashed on Nigerians.

It is absolutely demonic that with what Nigerians are presently constrained to go through for the ultimate good of our national economy, crooked bankers in collaboration with regulators should be allowed to run riot stealing what little they have.

Why must the customer be constrained to have to sort out a declined debit with their bank – why not the merchant?

How many times are we supposed to go to the bank, all thanks to the stone age incompetence of the banks, themselves, the irresponsibility of the telecoms companies, the brigandage of the NCC, and the idiocy of the Consumer Protection Council?

No government should allow its citizens to be put through such horrendous torment by thieves masquerading as bankers and regulators, Mr President!

I personally suspect a dimension of sabotage to what the banks are presently up to and it behoves on you, our President, not to allow your efforts to reposition our country to be further undermined by a bunch of the most hideous and totally despicable thieves, masquerading around as professional bankers in smart suits.

In fact, I cannot remember clocking a single failed POS transaction reversal in over a year – that is how miserably criminally oriented the banking system has become.

MR SHONUBI, CLEARLY, HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO OFFER.
I have heard positive things said by close associates of mine who are close associates of our Acting CBN Governor but frankly, I’m not interested.

It is a reasonable, indeed a most reliable, presumption that he was part of the diabolical rot under Emiefele and is in absolutely no position, whatsoever, to to chart a new course for the institution – or what remains of it, if anything, that is.

Far from being allowed to continue with what is clearly business-as-usual in the apex bank, Shonubi and his colleagues who worked alongside Emiefele should be suspended, investigated and prosecuted for the horrors the bank unleashed on Nigerians over the past eight years and continuing.

What we need now is a Central Bank Governor in the mold of Governor Charles Soludo or Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, indeed one who knows his onions, has the fear of God, takes his responsibilities as articles of faith and “brutally” gets the criminal enterprises currently masquerading as banks to become real banks once again.

What we desperately require is a sniper of a Central Bank Governor that will flush out the banking sector from top to bottom!

WHEN A CENTRAL BANK GOES ROGUE!
In short, the entire Central Bank of Nigeria should be audited, probed, assessed, scrutinized and investigated from top to bottom regarding our national finances and its fidelity to its mandate as a regulator.

If we need to sack every last man working there and creat an entirely new apex banking structure and paradigm, well, so be it, Your Excellency, my President.

CENTRAL BANKING IS THE MOST STRAIGHTFORWARD SPECIES OF BANKING.
My President, let no one tell you there’s anything special about central banking; central banking is far more straightforward than commercial banking – I would say that informal banking, like “ususu”, for instance, is the most difficult banking of all!

It is basically similar to teaching, for instance; the most difficult classes to handle and teach are creche and kindergarten, the easiest to superintend and teach is doctorate – doctoral candidates require the least supervision and guidance of all!

Frankly, you could sack the entirety of the Central Bank of Nigeria from Mr Shonubi to the gateman and we would have an apex bank functioning immediately thereafter!

WHAT WE HAVE IS A CESSPIT OF A CENTRAL BANK!
How was our country ever going to survive with such a crooked institution as its apex bank?

These utterly despicable clowns at the Central Bank were just busy loaning insane sums to themselves, raking up humongous running costs at our expense as a nation, frittering away our national wealth, mortgaging our foreign reserves and doing absolutely no actual regulation while they were all robbing us blind!

Mr President, these people should all be in jail and certainly not running monetary policy for Africa’s biggest economy!

My President, do you know how people get to work in the Central Bank of Nigeria or, indeed, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Limited, NNPCL, for that matter?

This governor nominates his daughter and that senator brings his nephew!

There is absolutely nothing about competence or merit in that nauseating latrine and shameless nest of thieves.

How could such a disgrace and pathetic excuse for a Central Bank possibly make the cut as the apex bank of the pride and hope of the Black Race?

Mr President, no matter how hard you try to fix this nation, you simply have to get rid of these truly twisted people or they will keep frustrating and undermining your best efforts.

They are not reformable: they are disposable, so flush them all down the toilet, sir.

WE HAVE TO GALVANIZE THIS COUNTRY TO KEY INTO YOUR AGENDA!
Trust me, my President: truly terrible things orchestrated by the Central Bank and the banking industry, with Nigerians at the receiving end, have been going on in this country and that is quite apart from the growing discontent and palpable anger in the land.

Tackling them will make you more popular – the man or woman currently facing the brunt of the ongoing teething problems we must all cope with for the ultimate good of our country, who suddenly receives a reversal as per a failed transaction that they had given up on, would be far less likely to believe the crap the opposition is spewing about you and be more inclined to key into your Renewed Hope vision for Nigeria.

We urgently require a new substantive CBN Governor with a character and outlook similar to Soludo or Sanusi to clamp down on all the malfeasance the banking industry is wickedly and wantonly subjecting our national economy to.

We just can’t continue like this, my President.

Thankfully, you were forthright enough to suspend the crooked Governor who wrecked our national economy, tanked our legal tender and subjected our citizenry to monetary torture.

Nevertheless, it is crystal clear that our pathetic excuse for an apex bank is yet to get the memo that there is a new sheriff in town.

Apparently, just like those hoisting gigantic billboards to intimidate the Judiciary in their unhinged quest to steal your mandate while pretending they are merely trying to reclaim their own, the fat cats at the Central Bank are convinced you will be sacked by the courts.

It is time to clean the Augean Stables at the Central Bank of Nigeria and guess what, we have just the right man to do that, our own Hercules in you, Batman, the Asiwaju, our President, to get the job done, sir.

Therefore, do not tarry a moment longer – show these unhinged people who you truly are; that you are Bola Tinubu, the Asiwaju, my President, their President, our President!

If the entire rank and file of the apex bank has to be done away with for sanity to be restored to our banking sector, so be it but it is your inescapable obligation to sweep the place clean, indeed in line with our party logo.

We cannot continue to put up with a central bank clearly in cahoots with currency speculators or with banks actively stealing what little funds our citizens have left to make ends meet in these trying times.

Clearly, the Central Bank is already way too corrupt and compromised to be reformed as it is.

The crooks, saboteurs and idiots who work there have to be flushed down the toilet in the process of your taking back our apex bank for our country.

OUT WITH SHONUBI!
I don’t know the Acting CBN Governor but he is very well known to people that are very well known to me.

Some of them think quite highly of him but frankly I don’t care anymore because it is our national economy that’s at stake and we cannot continue along a “paddy-paddy” paradigm.

Mr Shonubi has been an exceptionally lackluster central banker who does not seem to understand the very first thing about central banking – the role is as much optical as it is technical!

We hardly heard anything from him till you summoned him to the Villa and even at that, his performance was anything but forceful or capable of instilling confidence in his capacity to deliver on his assignment.

Even if just as a lawyer, it is difficult for me to see how Shonubi is in any position to turn around our apex bank when it is very difficult to separate him from the utter diabolism that Godwin Emiefele brought to bear upon the bank.

My President, I don’t think Mr Shonubi or anyone else at the Central Bank of Nigeria takes you seriously or wants you to succeed.

These are people that have become so used to robbing our nation blind that the only solution to the existential menace they represent is for you to flush them all out, have them rounded up, thoroughly investigated, relentlessly prosecuted and jailed.

MY PRESIDENT, SHOW NIGERIANS WHO YOU ARE!
Thankfully, Mr President, you are the duly, lawfully, constitutionally, validly and altogether properly elected President of this country.

Let those trying to steal your mandate go to the International Court of Justice at the Hague, let them go to the Vatican and even request an assizes presided over by His Holiness, The Pope, himself, you will still win, hands down, any election petition brought against you!

That is how utterly, totally, unassailably genuine, authentic and indisputable your mandate is, Your Excellency!

Our job now is to convince Nigerians that you mean well for them and that the will of God is already unfolding in this country.

Unfortunately, and, as it is now, the Central Bank of Nigeria is the very worst institution in our entire country and represents a totally intolerable danger to our economic health and your vision for repositioning this nation.

Pounce on it immediately and with utmost brutality!

Onokpasa, a lawyer, was a member, All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council, and, writes from Abuja.