LAMIDO Sanusi has a penchant for courting controversy. Fresh from being turbanned a few days earlier as Dan Majen Kano, the Central Bank of Nigeria Governor waltzed into his office on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, causing an unnecessary stir. Wrapped from head to toe in traditional robes, he looked rather out of place in a central bank office; more like a dignitary at a local durbar than a banker, not the least the nation’s number one banker. Though three years now on the job, Sanusi needs to rise above such theatricals and preserve the aura of his exalted office.
In vain, many analysts have reminded the CBN chief that his office demands moderation in both his public and private lives. His occasional failure to exhibit this precious attribute has often enmeshed him in needless controversies since he was named to the post in June 2009. Sadly, those controversies tend to distract from the serious business of monetary policy management and bank regulation. While there is nothing in the CBN Act or in the Constitution that bars a CBN governor from taking a local traditional title while in office, decorum should dictate to any occupant of that office that breezing into the offices of the nation’s symbol of financial sovereignty in full religious/traditional regalia is ill-advised. Sanusi’s drama was even more inappropriate as, just a week earlier, eight employees of the apex bank were reported to be among the 153 passengers that died in the Dana Air aircraft that crashed onto a building in Lagos, plunging the nation into mourning.

As if to underscore his penchant for embroiling the apex bank in the nation’s divisive impulses, a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja declared that “Islamic banking,” which Sanusi rammed down the throats of Nigerians, was illegal and unconstitutional. It was precisely his cantankerous attitude that riveted the nation in a rumpus last year over the non-interest banking model, widely viewed as a complementary financial institution to orthodox banking. Though critics persistently pointed out that the existing CBN guidelines adequately took care of a variety of non-interest banking streams and that adding a religious term would violate the law and the Constitution, the governor went ahead to grant an “Islamic” banking licence to Jaiz Group rather than simply settle for “non-interest” as spelt out in the rules.