Sanusi: An elephant in the China shop

WHEN an elephant finds its way into a China shop it turns it into a wasteland. As a sadist, it takes the delicate and breakable ornaments as a footmat to wipe its enormous feet on. In the process the shop is reduced to smithereens. This is the picture Lamido Sanusi, CBN Governor, appears to be cutting for himself with his spurious exercise at sanitising the nation's banking sector.

The governor's antics remind me of a misadventure story of a fishpond owner who felt his pond had some dirt in it, and decided to get rid of the unwanted substance. What he did, he took out all the fish, healthy fish, drained out the water and disinfected the pond! He brought the fish back to the pond and filled it with deionised water!

Satisfied with himself that he had sanitised his dirty fishpond, the man went to sleep. He returned the next day to discover his fish had carried swollen cheeks with their bellies turned upward in the water. They had suffocated! They had died! The combined effects of disinfecting the pond and introducing deionised water into it had turned the pond into a wasteland.

This is exactly what is about to happen with Sanusi's deep furrow into the banking sector. Granted that the Nigerian banking institution, like the fishpond above, has some dirt in it, you don't get rid of the dirt by subjecting the institution to a massive overdose of treatment. That would be like cutting the head to spite a bad nose.

As I said, no one is giving our banking sector a clean bill of health or absolving it from blame. No. There are lots of contradictions and hiccups in the institution that need to be excised. Just recently I had cause to write my banker to explain to me some spurious charges I noticed in my monthly account statement they sent to me. As expected, they chose to ignore my letter. For all they cared, I could go to blazes, if I wanted. At another time, the money I sent to my son was withdrawn from his ATM account by an unknown person. When the bank was contacted about the matter, the manager said there's nothing the bank could do.

Another big problem with Nigerian Banks is their condescending disposition towards those they consider as fringe customers. All my efforts, for example, since I started banking with the various banks, to secure a small loan to run my publishing business have met a brick wall. The banks prefer to deal with the so-called big men, for the handsome cash inducement they get from them. And they care less if these so-called big men end up, as it is often the case, not servicing their loans.

At face value, looking at the rot in the banking sector, some are wont to applaud the courage of Sanusi for daring the secret cows occupying the helms of affairs in the five distraught banks. But then, the banking sector is like no other sector of the economy. It holds a prime position in any nation's economy. You can only gamble with it to your own eternal peril. Banks do not operate in isolation. What you do to one bank can set up a chain of reactions in the whole sector.

Already, the unwarranted public disgrace being served the sacked five banks' chief executive officers, apart from causing a run in the whole banking sector (I have closed down my own account with the Union Bank for fear of my money being trapped there), has started to erode the confidence other countries have in our economy. Some correspondent banks, according to media reports, have begun to reject our letters of credit. And very soon, if this elephant in the China shop, the man Sanusi, is not caged, Nigeria would be in for what it never bargained for.

We would be ostracised by the community of creditor nations and refused access to the world's credit market. That means, henceforth, we would only be allowed to trade with other nations on cash-and-carry basis. Obviously for a highly import-dependent economy like ours, that would lead to scarcity and a runaway inflation. And trouble. And confusion. And, Don't say I didn't tell you.

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