The governor, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mallam Lamido Sanusi, has revealed the details of the four pillars of banking reforms at the pre-convocation lecture of the 28th Convocation of the Bayero University, Kano.

The lecture, which took place on Friday, February 26, 2010, was chaired by the Governor of Lagos State, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, and was attended by host of top government officials, technocrats, top politicians, captains of industry and academics from all over the country.

In a paper entitled: “The Nigerian Banking Industry: What went wrong and way forward”, Sanusi challenged the academics for their noticeable absence in the discourse on the banking crisis which he considered tragic because the discourse “has been left to journalists of varying degrees of sophistication, and to faceless agents and charlatans”.

He, therefore, challenged the intellectuals to take advantage of the opening salvo fired by the CBN to lead what he said “could potentially be a revolutionary battle against the nexus of money and influence that has held the country at ransom for decades.”

Discussing the paper and what went wrong, Sanusi said “eight main interdependent factors led to the creation of an extremely fragile financial system that was tipped into crisis by the global financial crisis and recession.”

He gave the factors to include: macroeconomic instability caused by large and sudden capital inflows; major failures in corporate governance at banks; lack of investor and consumer protection; inadequate disclosure and transparency about the financial position of banks; critical gaps in regulatory framework and regulations; uneven supervision and enforcement; unstructured governance and management process at the CBN and weaknesses in the business environment in the country.

Turning to the reform programme of the CBN, and in obvious reference to opponents who claimed that the CBN had no strategy or there was no roadmap to the reforms; the CBN governor said, while the U.S had just set up a committee to undertake a study of what went wrong over there, after achieving some stability; in our own case, “we commissioned a detailed study with the involvement of the CBN and external resources to diagnose the problems and come out with solutions” which he said culminated into the formulation of the blue print or roadmap for the reforms.”