By Samuel Ajayi
As the recession continues to dominate discussion and Nigerians brace up for the inevitable difficult days ahead, it is obvious that President Muhammadu Buhari and his team (good at promising so much, delivering little and living the blame game) have a lot of flaks to take. And by now, I think they are even flak-drunk! Therefore, let’s look beyond the president, APC and the government and examine the house of crooks called banks.
For long, our banks have always posted big profits and massive turnovers, both in cash and assets. But the more they do this, the more the economy goes down. Something simply does not add. I don’t know how the financial sector keeps growing while both the formal and informal sectors keep groaning! And I think now the hen has come home to roost.
First, TSA (Treasury Single Account) was never planned the way Buhari and his ‘angelic’ team implemented it. The plan was to take the money to CBN to ascertain how much government makes and then takes it back to commercial banks. And we are talking of banks that have, for decades, relied on public sector funds to live large, post heavy profits and pay obscene salaries and allowances to their executive directors. I know a bank manager who was once on FIFTY MILLION NAIRA Christmas bonus! Apart from this there were round tripping, illegal deductions and so on. If you see a governor that just comes to office, you see bank MDs paying him courtesy visit. They don’t like his face: what they want is for him to open account with them and the billions from Federation Account will be landing there. It is so easy and profitable that our banks became institutionally LAZY!
You may ask me how.
Our banks are never ready to fund any long-term project. If you go to them with proposals, they shoot it down. Ask for N100m to finance a project, the conditions they give you will make you run away. They prefer keeping money for and lending governments and charge lower interest rate than give a small and medium scale businessman loan. Some of them do it but only very few compared to the number of banks we have.
Apart from this, banks do not mind keeping N5 billion for a state government (or lending) and charge just, say, 3% (which comes to N150m) than lending an investor N500million! The only money they were lending quickly then was for importation of fuel and they got paid back via the bazaar called subsidy payment.
The implication of this is that for years, our banks have been ‘growing’ outside the contributions of the private sector but mainly on public sector funds.
Are we aware of how many business plans that would have materialised and employed millions of Nigerians today only if banks had supported them? I mean small and medium businesses whose proposals have gathered dust on the shelves of our banks. Perhaps, our economy would have been strong enough to withstand the mess-up by Aso Rock.
Therefore, when we blame this obviously confused contraption called APC government, let us remember those visionless and greedy banks who helped run this economy down via their shortsightedness!
They deserve a date with the gatekeeper for the hall of infamy!
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