The major culprit in the bank crisis is the government, which regularly fails to pay oil marketers on time.

Fingers are wagging at prominent businessmen and careless bankers, but we can report today that the government is a major reason many banks are insolvent and on life support.

No, the government does not owe these banks directly. But just the five banks whose executive suites have been taken over by the Central Bank of Nigeria are owed more than N487 billion by petroleum products marketers, who sell diesel, gasoline, kerosene and other products everyday to the public.

Most of the companies, known in industry parlance as operating in the “downstream oil sector,” are in turn owed an estimated N70 billion by the Federal Government, through such agencies as the Petroleum Products Pricing and Regulatory Agency, better known by its acronymn, PPPRA.

The reason the government has to pay them is that the government subsidizes products such as gasoline and kerosene, a politically sensitive but financially ruinous policy that no administration has been able to scrap, to avoid public outrage.

Of the five insolvent banks, Oceanic Bank whose erstwhile chief executive, Cecilia Ibru, submitted herself to law enforcement officers on Wednesday in Lagos, has the highest exposure of N100 billion, followed by Intercontinental Bank, whose former CEO, Erastus Akingbola, has now been declared a fugitive, with N69 billion; Afribank has a N17 billion exposure, while Finbank has about N10 billion and Union N6 billion.

It?s not what you think