After a six hour meeting with clan heads and elders in Ovwor-Olomu,Delta State, top members of the Ibru maternal family, on Sunday decided to invoke their ancestral spirit against the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.

Spokesman of the Osajere family(maternal family of Olorogun Michael Ibru), Olorogun John Oguma told journalists in Ughelli that Mr Sanusi should reverse the decision of the apex bank on Mrs Ibru or face the wrath of the Olomu spirits.

Oguma said Mr Sanusi’s agenda is based on religious and ethnic agenda, particularly his bid to introduce Islamic financial services in the country.

“As a matter of fact, deducing Ibru’s dismissal from bank loans raises enormous doubts in the minds of all sincere Nigerians and by implications questions the credibility of Sanusi and his cohorts,” Mr Oguma said.

To avoid the wrath of the ancestors, Oguma advised the CBN leadership and the EFCC to release Mrs Ibru, reinstate her as the managing director of Oceanic Bank and give the bank time to recover the loans.

He also called on Mr. Sanusi and the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Farida Waziri to apologize to Mrs Ibru and the family within seven days.

The family had earlier declared that the ongoing reform by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is aimed at stealing Oceanic bank from the owners.

Insult to Urhobo marital law

They also described the arrest of Mrs Ibru by security agents as an insult to the marital laws of Urhobo land.

The family spokesperson said: “We are not happy. Sanusi and his co-travellers want to steal Oceanic bank from the owners. With the N420 billion, those behind the evil agenda would not only have majority shares in the banks but appoint their cronies in the boards and management of these banks.

“The greatest enemy of the Niger Delta people and current minister of petroleum, Rilwanu Lukman retired southerners in NNPC, replaced them with Northerners and gave them all the juicy positions. A reasonable Sansui should have given the banks ultimatum to recover their debts and change management in a democratic way by the shareholders, but he went ahead with his selfish agenda to sack the managing directors and board of directors and replaced with figureheads.” The family accused the leadership of the CBN of hastiness, when it has not thoroughly examined the books of all the banks in the country. It therefore “challenged Sanusi to publish the status of First Bank, UBA, Unity Bank, GT Bank, Bank PHB, FCMB and other banks.”

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.

The train wreck that is our banking system was not an act of nature. It was real human beings, overcome with real human greed, and blinded by real human delusions, who have brought us to this sorry pass.

Of course, the guilty party is that class of avaricious “bankers” whose lack of character and basic human decency threatens our entire economy. It is just that the worst of them be ignominiously removed, from the system, as well as pursued by law enforcement agencies so that the guilty can be put where they really belong-- in prison.

But these people were aided and abetted by a whole phalanx of willing collaborators. Yesterday on these pages we spoke about regulatory agencies, chief among them the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose executives became conveniently pliant as criminal elements in the banking system engaged in Ponzi schemes, and then ran off with the family silver.

Already the Central Bank has had to pump N420 billion of our money into the five zombie banks to keep depositors safe. These are Oceanic, Intercontinental, Union, Afribank, and Finbank. A number of other banks are marginally surviving, and Central Bank officials estimate preliminarily that it would cost taxpayers upwards of N1 trillion just to keep them afloat. We know of no country in the world where early estimates don’t end up costing at least twice as much. So we will not be surprised if the final price tag charged to the taxpayer is around N2 trillion.

We are all justly outraged by this blatant theft that has gone to the purchase of private jets for our so-called bankers, some of whom are only a few years removed from the bush.

But where were the auditors?

For the past four years, our biggest audit firms-- Deloitte, KPMG and PriceWaterhouseCoopers-- have nodded and winked as our banks cooked the books and cheated depositors and ordinary shareholders of their hard-earned money. The auditors, being very handsomely paid indeed, were quite happy to play along.

Every year the banks declared ever-larger profits, announcing numbers so outlandish that they created a frenzy on the stock exchange, persuading ordinary citizens to part with their savings and invest in their stocks. At one point, banks alone became so supersized ithat they constituted about 60 percent of the total value of the Lagos stock exchange.

Also collaborating in this heist-- for that really is what it was-- was a whole army of so-called analysts, chief among them the bright sparks at Renaissance Capital, or RenCap, who, as late as a couple of months ago, were loudly insisting that Intercontinental Bank was in fact in rude health, despite all signs to the contrary. To paraphrase the possibly apocryphal American, who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

We now know for certain that Intercontinental, as late as the last quarter of 2008, already was a zombie bank, with a poisonous loan book, whose publicly pious chief executive, Erastus Akingbola, had in fact thoroughly wrecked the institution and only dishonestly claimed that it was the banks’ competitors who were trying to “demarket” it.

We have no reason to believe that any of the auditing firms were engaged in any criminality. Far from it. What is clear, from available evidence, is that at minimum they are guilty of gross dereliction, which will cost us at least N1 trillion.

Remember Enron? That was the American energy company that declared fanciful numbers for so long that Fortune magazine crowned it America’s best company for seven straight years. In the end, Enron was found to be an elaborate scam, with the complicity of its gold-plated auditor, Arthur Andersen. The debacle not only led to the crumbling of Enron but also the collapse of one of the world’s most reputable auditing firms.

We do not wish the same for our Big Three. But aggressive regulators must ask: what did they know, and when did they know it?