Sammiejokes: Some readers might not have had enough bandwidth to
watch the famous Sanusi Lamido Sanusi remarks made last
August at the TEDxYouth platform in Maitama, Abuja. It was
however not available for public access until last week, but
now we offer it to readers in transcribed text. If you prefer
to listen, click the play button below to listen to the audio.
The video is below, after the text.
Click here to listen on mobile.
View video on mobile
Hello everyone and good morning.
I’m very happy to be here with you. Just to tell you that I am
a rather outdated person. I never really knew what the
TEDeX event was, and when my daughter spoke to me about
it, she said something about youth and development.
I thought I’d just come here and talk about young people
and job creation and the usual stuff we talk about until a
group of young ladies came to me to explain that I was
actually expected to speak in 16 to 18 minutes about one
idea that can change the world.
I thought that was crazy because I don’t have any idea that
can change the world. And the thing with young people is
that they are the most difficult audience to address. I have
found myself in situations to address people of your
generation and frankly the questions I get are more incisive,
more intelligent, more thought-provoking than the questions
I get from people of my generation. At all levels.
I am actually just beginning to understand how difficult it is
for those of us who were in the analog generation to have a
conversation with our children.
I have am eight to nine-year-old daughter that I always see
in the morning and she goes to school, she comes back…
I’ve never really had serious conversation with her. Two
days ago we were at the table with her sister who is about 15
or 16 who then said to me you know dad it’s time for us to
start talking about boys. Before I could answer, this younger
one who’s eight or nine looks up and said ‘you want to talk
to dad about boys? He won’t understand. He is a man. He’s a
big boy.’
Now, you can imagine for me I mean this wasn’t the kind of
conversation I had with my mother or my father. So for me,
having … and of course the next day I had my son who’s in
Form one talking about chromosomes and X&Y cells on the
table. So this is a completely different world for me.
I am going to speak to you today about overcoming the fear
of vested interests.
It’s a topic that I have come to be engaged in mentally
because I have learnt in the four years also that I have been
in Abuja that if we understand, we may begin to unlock the
key to change our world. The world of the country in which
we live. And what is this country?
It’s a country of 167 million people, as you know. Largest
population in Africa. Second-biggest economy on the African
continent. In 1960 with the per capita income that was better
that higher than per capita income of South Korea. 1960
Nigeria was the preferred investment destination – prefered
to Japan according to US investment advisory – which has
always had potential but which has never been able to
realize that potential.
A country that specializes in exporting what it does not
produce and importing that which it produces.
One of the world’s largest producer of crude oil, that does
not refine its own petroleum products and has to import
petroleum products.
The world’s largest producer of cassava but does not
produce starch or ethanol.
A large tomato belt, yet the world’s largest importer of
tomato paste.
A country that from my childhood I have heard, had the
potentials for being a world power, but everyday we talk
about potentials! Everyday we talk about potentials!
Today we still talk about the potentials of Nigeria. And yet
China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil…
all of those countries have turned the potential that they had
into reality.
What are these? What’s the one thing that if I were to ask,
what is the one thing that we need to do to break this barrier
that faces us?
In four years in Abuja, I’ve come to the conclusion that we
need to overcome the fear vested interests.
I’ll talk to you through a little bit of my own experiences and
as governor of Central Bank and use that as a basis or as a
template for what I think we need to do if change this
country.
I became governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria in 2009
and this was in the middle of a global financial crisis. I came
to the central bank knowing that banks have problems and
believing that these problems were caused by a global crisis,
by the collapse in the capital market, the collapse in the
price of oil, and that they would be fixed by simply
addressing the normal risk management issues in banks.
Shortly after I came in and when we went through
investigations, I discovered that the Nigerian banking system
was infested with the same corruption of the renter system
in this country.
That a number of bank chief executives have taken their
banks and fleeced those bands and literally taken away
depositors’ money to buy property all over the country, all
over the world.
And just like people in ministries or in government agencies
or whenever they have opportunities in all companies, the
bank’s were themselves a site for rent seeking.
The fundamental character of the Nigerian state is that for
decades since we found oil, it has existed, not to serve the
people but as a site for rent extraction by a very small
minority that controls political power.
It doesn’t matter where this group comes from. Whether it’s
north or South or muslim or christian or military or civilian,
the State has always being the sites for the extraction of rent
with the exception of a few years that we can think of, when
we’ve had development.
This is at the heart of the problems of this country.
Now when we discovered this – and I’ll give a few examples,
these are well known now, they’ve been published.
You know there was one chief executive officer that took
away from her bank over 200 billion naira.
Okay that was over a billion dollars. And where was this
money taken to? Purchase of property. We recovered from
one CEO 200 pieces of real estate in Dubai. Real estate in
Johannesburg. Real estate in Potomac in Washington apart
from shares in over 100 companies.
And all of those were purchased with depositors’ funds.
We went to the court in UK on the case of another CEO, we
got a judgment against that CEO for $142 billion naira stolen
from the bank, taken to buy shares while manipulating the
shares of his own institution and also transferred outside to
purchase property.
Now the first CEO we were able to convict, we recovered
these assets and got a six-month sentence and sorted it out.
The second CEO, we finished our case, established in Nigeria
– we had a civil case in the UK, we had a criminal case in
Nigeria – established the case… two weeks before the
closing statements were made the judge was miraculously
promoted to the Federal Court of Appeal. After three years
of trial at the very end of trial!
Because someone, a very popular religious leader with
hundreds of thousands of supporters, carried into political
authorities, and the system that was supposed to protect
depositors and handle criminals was used and manipulated
to promote a judge so that he would not convict a thief.
Now this is an example and an instance of the kinds of
things that happen in a country that stop a country from
reaching its full potentials.
But my experience with the banking reforms, and how it
affects the fear of vested interest is as the following.
After we discovered the things that happened in the banks,
the critical thing we had to do was to take a decision that
would pitch us against powerful political and economic
forces.
We were dealing with chief executives that in 2009 had
become invincible. They were in the seat of power. They had
economic power and they had bought political protection.
The were into political parties, they had financed elections of
officers and they believed that nobody could touch them.
And every time I said it was time for us to take action,
people said to me you can’t touch these people, you’ll be
sacked. Or you can’t touch these people they will kill you. Or
you can’t touch these people, you can’t do that.
And I said you know what? We are going to take them on.
And we took the decision. We’re going to remove them. You
know what? We removed them and nothing happened.
We’re going to prosecute them, we’re going to put them in
jail. And we put one of them in jail.
And were are going to recover these assets. Because the way
the central bank operated in the past, these guys take all this
money and the central bank says “the bank has failed”.
The banks that we saved had 4.4 trillion naira in deposits.
They had eight to ten million customers. But the government
and the system has always berthed on the side of the rich
people.
Because these eight million customers, the old woman in
Gboko or in Yenagoa, or Maiduguri, who has been told to
save her money and who’s saved money for 40-50 years
wakes up one day and all her savings are gone.
The civil servants whose saved for 35-40 years, kept his
pension money in the bank, the school fees of his children,
their medical bills, wakes up one day and he finds that his
bank is barricaded because the bank has failed.
Banks do not fail.
When people say banks have failed, it’s like saying a man
whose throat has been slit and you say the man died. He did
not die, he was killed.
And those that murder the banks, those that destroy these
deposits have always walked away. They become senators.
They become governors. They become captains of industry.
They set up new banks and they continue. And the millions
of poor people who don’t have a voice. That’s it!
Nobody knows the number of Nigerians who have died from
failed banks because they were sick and could no longer pay
their medical bills because the money was locked up in a
bank that has failed.
Nobody knows the number of children whose parents could
very well afford to pay their school fees who had to drop out
of school because banks were mismanaged.
So we use this as one instance, as one example of what you
can do if you are ready to confront these vested interests.
And deal with them and protect the poor for the very first
time.
But the banking industry is just one part of Nigeria. What is
happening in other areas?
Take the oil industry. We talking about fuel subsidy.
In 2009 this country paid $291 billion naira as subsidy for
petroleum products. By 2011, this number had jumped to
2.7 trillion naira.
Did we start consuming 10 times as much petrol? Do we
have 10 times as many cars? Did the population of Nigeria
multiply 10 times?
I did not believe those numbers. I screamed against those
numbers, and more people screamed, of course we tried to
remove subsidy, there was occupy Nigeria.
There have been investigations, and what did we discover?
That a lot of that money never went to fuel subsidy that was
consumed by Nigerians.
There are people in this country that produced pieces of
paper and brought to PPPRA and somebody stamped those
pieces of paper and said they brought in petroleum
products and actually paid them subsidy. And those pieces
of paper said I brought 30,000 metric tones on so so ship,
and we discovered that the said ship was nowhere near the
coast of Nigeria on that date.
We have seen vessels that did not even exist – that had been
retired – on bills of landing and money has been paid. And
you know what? None of them as I speak to you has gone to
jail.
This is the only country in the world where you have
something called oil theft. Where vessels can simply come
and take crude oil and literally just drive out of the country.
You see the numbers every day 100,000 200,000 400,000
barrels a day, nobody even knows. 7.3 billion naira.
How does anybody take oil in a vessel and leave the
country? We’ve got the Navy, we’ve got NIMASA, we’ve got
security services, you’ve got the oil companies themselves.
And every day we complain about the lack of development.
We don’t have development because Vested Interests
continue to rape this country and continue to take the
money out.
And the only way you’re going to move from potential to
reality it is stop preaching and start asking yourself how can
we overcome the fear of Vested Interest and how can we
confronts them?
And if there’s one thing I learned from banking, it is that they
are not to be feared. They stand on quicksand. They’ve got
only two tools. They are not very intelligent people. It
doesn’t take much intelligence to steal. If they were smart,
they probably will not be stealing. They’d find other things to
do.
They have two weapons and two weapons only. First is how
much do you want? And if you don’t want anything, then I’m
going to destroy you.
If you don’t want their money and if you are not afraid of
them you’ll destroy them. There’s nothing else in there.
You’re more intelligent!
And we’ve got to ask ourselves as a country, how have we
allowed ourselves to be reduced to a level that is so far
below our potential.
A few weeks ago, I was in Lagos, at Tinubu’s birthday, at the
colloquium and I spoke to young people. I said we have 65
million young people in Nigeria, I’ll give you one idea. You
have 65 million youth in Nigeria, what does it take for one of
you to get your votes be the president of this country?
What does it take for you to say you’re tired of my
generation. I’m going to get one 40-year-old intelligent,
committed, patriotic Nigerian and we are going to ask all the
youth to vote for him.
What does it take for you to address this issue sector by
sector? Identify these interests one by one and confront
them.
Why does it have to take fuel subsidy removal for us to
come out and challenge the rot that is in our country?
What are we afraid of? We are afraid of losing the security
that we have today. We may not lose it today, we will lose it
tomorrow.
So there is one thing I have, one message I have for every
Nigerian: is to remember that the problems of this country
are enormous, the solution is simple and that solution is we
must overcome.
We must recognize that at the heart of the problem of
Nigeria, at the heart of ninety percent of our issues – from
Boko Haram, to religious crisis, to ethnic crisis to
unemployment, to the lack of education, to the lack of
health care – is that there are people who profit from the
poverty and underdevelopment of this country.
And these people are called Vested Interests.
And so long as they remain entrenched, and so long as we
do not overcome our fear of them and dislodge them, we
are not going to find a solution to this problem and we are
not going to reach true potentials.
My time is up.
Thank you very much.

ratiken: Vested interest or not, SLS is the major Bokoharam financial sponsor.

ratiken: Vested interest or not, SLS is the major Bokoharam financial sponsor.

ratiken: Vested interest or not, SLS is the major Bokoharam financial sponsor.

Sammiejokes: Some readers might not have had enough bandwidth to
watch the famous Sanusi Lamido Sanusi remarks made last
August at the TEDxYouth platform in Maitama, Abuja. It was
however not available for public access until last week, but
now we offer it to readers in transcribed text. If you prefer
to listen, click the play button below to listen to the audio.
The video is below, after the text.
Click here to listen on mobile.
View video on mobile
Hello everyone and good morning.
I’m very happy to be here with you. Just to tell you that I am
a rather outdated person. I never really knew what the
TEDeX event was, and when my daughter spoke to me about
it, she said something about youth and development.
I thought I’d just come here and talk about young people
and job creation and the usual stuff we talk about until a
group of young ladies came to me to explain that I was
actually expected to speak in 16 to 18 minutes about one
idea that can change the world.
I thought that was crazy because I don’t have any idea that
can change the world. And the thing with young people is
that they are the most difficult audience to address. I have
found myself in situations to address people of your
generation and frankly the questions I get are more incisive,
more intelligent, more thought-provoking than the questions
I get from people of my generation. At all levels.
I am actually just beginning to understand how difficult it is
for those of us who were in the analog generation to have a
conversation with our children.
I have am eight to nine-year-old daughter that I always see
in the morning and she goes to school, she comes back…
I’ve never really had serious conversation with her. Two
days ago we were at the table with her sister who is about 15
or 16 who then said to me you know dad it’s time for us to
start talking about boys. Before I could answer, this younger
one who’s eight or nine looks up and said ‘you want to talk
to dad about boys? He won’t understand. He is a man. He’s a
big boy.’
Now, you can imagine for me I mean this wasn’t the kind of
conversation I had with my mother or my father. So for me,
having … and of course the next day I had my son who’s in
Form one talking about chromosomes and X&Y cells on the
table. So this is a completely different world for me.
I am going to speak to you today about overcoming the fear
of vested interests.
It’s a topic that I have come to be engaged in mentally
because I have learnt in the four years also that I have been
in Abuja that if we understand, we may begin to unlock the
key to change our world. The world of the country in which
we live. And what is this country?
It’s a country of 167 million people, as you know. Largest
population in Africa. Second-biggest economy on the African
continent. In 1960 with the per capita income that was better
that higher than per capita income of South Korea. 1960
Nigeria was the preferred investment destination – prefered
to Japan according to US investment advisory – which has
always had potential but which has never been able to
realize that potential.
A country that specializes in exporting what it does not
produce and importing that which it produces.
One of the world’s largest producer of crude oil, that does
not refine its own petroleum products and has to import
petroleum products.
The world’s largest producer of cassava but does not
produce starch or ethanol.
A large tomato belt, yet the world’s largest importer of
tomato paste.
A country that from my childhood I have heard, had the
potentials for being a world power, but everyday we talk
about potentials! Everyday we talk about potentials!
Today we still talk about the potentials of Nigeria. And yet
China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil…
all of those countries have turned the potential that they had
into reality.
What are these? What’s the one thing that if I were to ask,
what is the one thing that we need to do to break this barrier
that faces us?
In four years in Abuja, I’ve come to the conclusion that we
need to overcome the fear vested interests.
I’ll talk to you through a little bit of my own experiences and
as governor of Central Bank and use that as a basis or as a
template for what I think we need to do if change this
country.
I became governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria in 2009
and this was in the middle of a global financial crisis. I came
to the central bank knowing that banks have problems and
believing that these problems were caused by a global crisis,
by the collapse in the capital market, the collapse in the
price of oil, and that they would be fixed by simply
addressing the normal risk management issues in banks.
Shortly after I came in and when we went through
investigations, I discovered that the Nigerian banking system
was infested with the same corruption of the renter system
in this country.
That a number of bank chief executives have taken their
banks and fleeced those bands and literally taken away
depositors’ money to buy property all over the country, all
over the world.
And just like people in ministries or in government agencies
or whenever they have opportunities in all companies, the
bank’s were themselves a site for rent seeking.
The fundamental character of the Nigerian state is that for
decades since we found oil, it has existed, not to serve the
people but as a site for rent extraction by a very small
minority that controls political power.
It doesn’t matter where this group comes from. Whether it’s
north or South or muslim or christian or military or civilian,
the State has always being the sites for the extraction of rent
with the exception of a few years that we can think of, when
we’ve had development.
This is at the heart of the problems of this country.
Now when we discovered this – and I’ll give a few examples,
these are well known now, they’ve been published.
You know there was one chief executive officer that took
away from her bank over 200 billion naira.
Okay that was over a billion dollars. And where was this
money taken to? Purchase of property. We recovered from
one CEO 200 pieces of real estate in Dubai. Real estate in
Johannesburg. Real estate in Potomac in Washington apart
from shares in over 100 companies.
And all of those were purchased with depositors’ funds.
We went to the court in UK on the case of another CEO, we
got a judgment against that CEO for $142 billion naira stolen
from the bank, taken to buy shares while manipulating the
shares of his own institution and also transferred outside to
purchase property.
Now the first CEO we were able to convict, we recovered
these assets and got a six-month sentence and sorted it out.
The second CEO, we finished our case, established in Nigeria
– we had a civil case in the UK, we had a criminal case in
Nigeria – established the case… two weeks before the
closing statements were made the judge was miraculously
promoted to the Federal Court of Appeal. After three years
of trial at the very end of trial!
Because someone, a very popular religious leader with
hundreds of thousands of supporters, carried into political
authorities, and the system that was supposed to protect
depositors and handle criminals was used and manipulated
to promote a judge so that he would not convict a thief.
Now this is an example and an instance of the kinds of
things that happen in a country that stop a country from
reaching its full potentials.
But my experience with the banking reforms, and how it
affects the fear of vested interest is as the following.
After we discovered the things that happened in the banks,
the critical thing we had to do was to take a decision that
would pitch us against powerful political and economic
forces.
We were dealing with chief executives that in 2009 had
become invincible. They were in the seat of power. They had
economic power and they had bought political protection.
The were into political parties, they had financed elections of
officers and they believed that nobody could touch them.
And every time I said it was time for us to take action,
people said to me you can’t touch these people, you’ll be
sacked. Or you can’t touch these people they will kill you. Or
you can’t touch these people, you can’t do that.
And I said you know what? We are going to take them on.
And we took the decision. We’re going to remove them. You
know what? We removed them and nothing happened.
We’re going to prosecute them, we’re going to put them in
jail. And we put one of them in jail.
And were are going to recover these assets. Because the way
the central bank operated in the past, these guys take all this
money and the central bank says “the bank has failed”.
The banks that we saved had 4.4 trillion naira in deposits.
They had eight to ten million customers. But the government
and the system has always berthed on the side of the rich
people.
Because these eight million customers, the old woman in
Gboko or in Yenagoa, or Maiduguri, who has been told to
save her money and who’s saved money for 40-50 years
wakes up one day and all her savings are gone.
The civil servants whose saved for 35-40 years, kept his
pension money in the bank, the school fees of his children,
their medical bills, wakes up one day and he finds that his
bank is barricaded because the bank has failed.
Banks do not fail.
When people say banks have failed, it’s like saying a man
whose throat has been slit and you say the man died. He did
not die, he was killed.
And those that murder the banks, those that destroy these
deposits have always walked away. They become senators.
They become governors. They become captains of industry.
They set up new banks and they continue. And the millions
of poor people who don’t have a voice. That’s it!
Nobody knows the number of Nigerians who have died from
failed banks because they were sick and could no longer pay
their medical bills because the money was locked up in a
bank that has failed.
Nobody knows the number of children whose parents could
very well afford to pay their school fees who had to drop out
of school because banks were mismanaged.
So we use this as one instance, as one example of what you
can do if you are ready to confront these vested interests.
And deal with them and protect the poor for the very first
time.
But the banking industry is just one part of Nigeria. What is
happening in other areas?
Take the oil industry. We talking about fuel subsidy.
In 2009 this country paid $291 billion naira as subsidy for
petroleum products. By 2011, this number had jumped to
2.7 trillion naira.
Did we start consuming 10 times as much petrol? Do we
have 10 times as many cars? Did the population of Nigeria
multiply 10 times?
I did not believe those numbers. I screamed against those
numbers, and more people screamed, of course we tried to
remove subsidy, there was occupy Nigeria.
There have been investigations, and what did we discover?
That a lot of that money never went to fuel subsidy that was
consumed by Nigerians.
There are people in this country that produced pieces of
paper and brought to PPPRA and somebody stamped those
pieces of paper and said they brought in petroleum
products and actually paid them subsidy. And those pieces
of paper said I brought 30,000 metric tones on so so ship,
and we discovered that the said ship was nowhere near the
coast of Nigeria on that date.
We have seen vessels that did not even exist – that had been
retired – on bills of landing and money has been paid. And
you know what? None of them as I speak to you has gone to
jail.
This is the only country in the world where you have
something called oil theft. Where vessels can simply come
and take crude oil and literally just drive out of the country.
You see the numbers every day 100,000 200,000 400,000
barrels a day, nobody even knows. 7.3 billion naira.
How does anybody take oil in a vessel and leave the
country? We’ve got the Navy, we’ve got NIMASA, we’ve got
security services, you’ve got the oil companies themselves.
And every day we complain about the lack of development.
We don’t have development because Vested Interests
continue to rape this country and continue to take the
money out.
And the only way you’re going to move from potential to
reality it is stop preaching and start asking yourself how can
we overcome the fear of Vested Interest and how can we
confronts them?
And if there’s one thing I learned from banking, it is that they
are not to be feared. They stand on quicksand. They’ve got
only two tools. They are not very intelligent people. It
doesn’t take much intelligence to steal. If they were smart,
they probably will not be stealing. They’d find other things to
do.
They have two weapons and two weapons only. First is how
much do you want? And if you don’t want anything, then I’m
going to destroy you.
If you don’t want their money and if you are not afraid of
them you’ll destroy them. There’s nothing else in there.
You’re more intelligent!
And we’ve got to ask ourselves as a country, how have we
allowed ourselves to be reduced to a level that is so far
below our potential.
A few weeks ago, I was in Lagos, at Tinubu’s birthday, at the
colloquium and I spoke to young people. I said we have 65
million young people in Nigeria, I’ll give you one idea. You
have 65 million youth in Nigeria, what does it take for one of
you to get your votes be the president of this country?
What does it take for you to say you’re tired of my
generation. I’m going to get one 40-year-old intelligent,
committed, patriotic Nigerian and we are going to ask all the
youth to vote for him.
What does it take for you to address this issue sector by
sector? Identify these interests one by one and confront
them.
Why does it have to take fuel subsidy removal for us to
come out and challenge the rot that is in our country?
What are we afraid of? We are afraid of losing the security
that we have today. We may not lose it today, we will lose it
tomorrow.
So there is one thing I have, one message I have for every
Nigerian: is to remember that the problems of this country
are enormous, the solution is simple and that solution is we
must overcome.
We must recognize that at the heart of the problem of
Nigeria, at the heart of ninety percent of our issues – from
Boko Haram, to religious crisis, to ethnic crisis to
unemployment, to the lack of education, to the lack of
health care – is that there are people who profit from the
poverty and underdevelopment of this country.
And these people are called Vested Interests.
And so long as they remain entrenched, and so long as we
do not overcome our fear of them and dislodge them, we
are not going to find a solution to this problem and we are
not going to reach true potentials.
My time is up.
Thank you very much.

Sammiejokes:
.
I have am eight to nine-year-old daughter that I always see
in the morning and she goes to school, she comes back…
I’ve never really had serious conversation with her. Two
days ago we were at the table with her sister who is about 15
or 16 who then said to me you know dad it’s time for us to
start talking about boys. Before I could answer, this younger
one who’s eight or nine looks up and said ‘you want to talk
to dad about boys? He won’t understand. He is a man. He’s a
big boy.’