Soludo

Soludo: Decision time for Yar’adua

Garba Deen Muhammad

A rumour passed through Abuja last week that come next Tuesday, the Federal Government would take a decision on whether to renew the tenure of CBN Governor Charles Soludo, or to sack him and hand him over to the EFCC (my expectation). Soludo lives an obscenely opulent life at public expense while the ‘super banks’ he created and the stock market value he helped to conjure up live on life support; the article below which was first published on this page in August last year is reprinted as a ‘tribute’ or epitaph to the damage Soludo has done to our economy in the last eight years. If his tenure is renewed, the FG should know that it is not with the support of millions of us. We don’t trust him.

Give him half the chance and he would try to convince you that whatever your troubles, he worries about them more than you do. At every opportunity, Professor Charles Soludo, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) wastes no time in telling the world how deeply concerned he is over the debilitating problem of poverty in northern Nigeria. And yet in the past eight years, from the time he was economic Adviser to former president Obasanjo to date, nobody has done more to aggravate this problem than he had. His most recent offensive was a recruitment exercise into the CBN conducted between June 2007 and June this year. In all Soludo had recruited 396 people; an incredible 340 of them from the South!

Squatting on this hill of hypocrisy and injustice, the man was at his sarcastic best again last weekend in Kaduna where he was a speaker at a lecture event organized by the Northern Development Initiative. Last year Soludo characterized poverty as a Northern Phenomenon”; last week he called for a state of emergency to be declared on poverty in the north.

The CBN boss was correct on both occasions. It is also obvious that Soludo relishes the opportunity to insult the north publicly; on its part, the North certainly deserves no sympathy and no one should deny Soludo the right to gorge himself; he is only echoing loudly the silent opinion of many Nigerians.

Sometime in January this year, I came across an article written by the publisher of The Mirror newspaper, Prince Emeka Obasi who is from the same south eastern part of Nigeria with Soludo. The article titled “Yar’Adua And The Future Of The North”, which appeared in his back page column,’ The Presidency’ of the Sunday Mirror of 27/1, was well researched and the arguments forcefully presented. In the article Mr. Obasi provided a perspective on what he believed to be the essential elements that define the North.

Throughout the article the author struggled to find the right adjectives to describe the peculiar and depressing characteristics of the Northern part of Nigeria without sounding too offensive or condescending. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a polite way of telling a people that they have failed.

Drawing from statistics published by the National Poverty Alleviation Programme (NAPEP), Obasi correctly summed up the story of Northern Nigeria: it is the poorest and most backward part of Nigeria, and it is getting poorer and more backward! The NAPEP figures on the incidence of poverty in the six geo-political zones in the country as quoted by Prince Obasi speak for themselves. In the North-West, 74 percent of the people are poor, that is they live on less than one dollar a day; in the North-East the poverty rate is 78 percent; North Central, the figure is 70 percent.

By contrast the South-West has about 28 percent; the South-South 30 percent, while the South-East, from where Soludo (lucky him) comes from, turned out to be the wealthiest part Nigeria with a poverty rate of 23 percent.

Obasi did not add, because he didn’t need to add, having used the portrait of a wretched beggar and his son to illustrate his views, that in addition to its poverty or may be because of it the North also has the highest concentration of beggars, of all ages, than anywhere else in the world; it has the lowest literacy rate in and the lowest per capita, or income per head in the country. It has its fair share of moral depravity too; from Kaduna to Kano and Sokoto, cases of 60-year old men defiling 14-year-old girls are rampant; in some cases fathers have been known to impregnate their under-age daughters!

This is the brief, bleak summary of ‘Soludo’s North’ and our North. Can anything be worse than this? Perhaps if the statistics, on which part of the country produces the highest number of ruthless armed robbers, manufacturers of fake drugs, conmen or 419ners, were to be computed, there might be some kind of parallel: a contrast between one society intent on destroying itself, with another bent on destroying others. Neither is desirable of course and a combination of the two in any one country is an absolute disaster. As it is we have only one of verifiable statistics, so…

We all know on which side of the miserable divide Soludo belongs; and he knows it too. Also few people, if any, are in any doubt that given the chance Soludo would love the opportunity to transform the North from a region of beggars to a bastion of hopeless destitute. When he introduced his controversial banking reform, Soludo resolutely refused to modify it by introducing categorization; a situation whereby instead of a fixed N25bn for all banks, the requirement could be categorized to a base level of N10bn, a medium level of N15bn and Soludo’s fixed level of N25bn. With support from former President Obasanjo, Soludo got his way; the result is that the North, thanks in whole to the greed, narrow vision and naked wickedness of its leadership class, is now completely marginalized in the financial system.

Every time I hear Soludo expresses his hypocritical concern for the North, I feel like throwing up, if possible on his suit. The lopsided recruitments the man supervised in the last one year referred to above, did not come by accident; Soludo carefully, deliberately and cold bloodedly contrived to further emasculate the North that he so much ‘cares’ for.

For instance, since becoming the CBN governor in 2004, he had launched relentless assaults on senior staff of the CBN that are from the North. He it was that terrorized Mrs. W. Mshelia, a former very competent deputy governor out of the CBN, frustrated another deputy governor, Dr. Shamsudden Sanusi, the current minister of national planning, and sacked a number of directors most of whom were of northern origin. At the moment the deputy governor (corporate services); the special adviser personnel; director human resources; all five deputy directors in the human resources department and the consultants that are he hires to conduct recruitment exercises for the CBN are all from the South! One then wonders how a thoroughly unrestrained ethnic jingoist like Soludo could have the audacity of voicing concern for a people to whom he would not even be fair.

Neither is Soludo’s lack of fairness his only failings. Lately his integrity has come under question. It used to be a subject of speculation; now it is officially confirmed that Nigeria’s foremost banker is not straight, to put it mildly. A report published mainly by the sister publication of this newspaper, the Daily Trust, on July 23 and 25 say that the high-powered Presidential Committee that investigated the affairs of the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) has unequivocally accused Soludo of “gross abuse of office, gross negligence, round tripping and money laundering”.

That is very interesting. Soludo might have succeeded in getting Obasanjo to arm-twist the last legislature to pass the CBN Act which not only gives him unlimited powers (which he is accused of abusing), but makes it virtually impossible for the president to sanction him; but the Act did not give the CBN Governor protection against abuse of office and money laundering. It is difficult to imagine how he can talk himself out of this one. Which is just as well, the CBN and the country can certainly do without the likes of Soludo.

And so would the North, in one sense. In another sense, the North would miss Soludo; because we do need ruthless opportunists like him to turn the knife in our wounds, to remind our so called leadership class, whoever and where ever they are, that it is not enough to just admit failure, as Gen. T. Y. Danjuma had done when he fell out with his erstwhile buddy, Obasanjo. They have to demonstrate that remorse through concrete actions. So far there is nothing to suggest that they have learned anything!