- Much ado about Aisha
It would appear on close scrutiny that there is really not much, after all, to the suspicions and allegations of irregularities attendant on President Muhammadu Buhari’s recent appointment of Mrs. Aisha Ahmad, a 40-year old investment banker as a Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), pending the confirmation of the Senate. Eyebrows had been raised in particular about the alleged elevation of Mrs. Ahmad to the position of Executive Director (Retail Services) at her previous place of employment, the Diamond Bank, barely 24 hours to her new appointment. Mrs. Ahmad’s seeming accelerated promotion at Diamond Bank, critics argued, was to enhance her qualification and suitability for the post of CBN Deputy Governor.
This insinuation is obviously far-fetched. Nothing in the CBN Act (2007) indicates that only Executive Directors of banks are eligible for employment in the top hierarchy of the apex bank. The new Deputy-Governor designate has over 20 years local and global experience in investment and retail banking, wealth management and financial advisory. Her academic credentials, which include a Master’s degree in Finance and Management from the Cranfield School of Management, UK, and an MBA degree, Finance, from the University of Lagos, are unassailable. All that the CBN Act requires for qualification as Deputy Governor of the CBN is that appointees “shall be persons of recognised financial experience”. Mrs. Ahmad’s appointment, therefore, does not breach any law.
However, if a new Bill to amend the CBN Act, which incidentally has scaled through the second reading in the House of Representatives, becomes law, appointments such as that of Mrs. Ahmad will become unlawful at the CBN. The proposed bill, among other provisions, states that “Managing Directors/CEOs and Executive Directors of a bank shall not be eligible to be appointed as Governors/Deputy Governors of CBN until after expiration of five years from their exit from the bank”. We unequivocally support this bill, which aims at limiting the possibility of conflict of interest between the top management of the CBN, tapped from the private sector banks, and the apex bank’s role in regulating and supervising the banks.
Even when an appointee to the top hierarchy of the CBN is not from the private sector banks as was the case with Professor Charles Soludo from the academia, who was CBN Governor from 2004 – 2009, the candidate can still be susceptible to unhealthy influences by powerful private bank chief executives. Thus, in spite of the reforms and drastic re-capitalisation of the banks undertaken by Soludo to sanitise the sector during his tenure, he was ultimately adjudged as being too cozy with the bank CEOs, a situation that bred regulatory laxity and left the banks not necessarily less fragile and precarious than he met them despite their more solid capital base.
Professor Soludo’s successor as CBN governor, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (2009 – 2014), was appointed from the private sector where he was CEO of First Bank of Nigeria. Sanusi aggressively pursued a policy of fighting fraud, loans of doubtful integrity and shady insider dealings in the banking sector resulting in the CBN sacking at least five bank chief executives and bailing out the affected banks with N400 billion of public funds.
In spite of Sanusi’s best efforts, he was dogged throughout his tenure by allegations of pursuing a hidden agenda motivated partly by personal vendetta against some of the CEOs who were once his colleagues. Without prejudice to the truth or otherwise of these insinuations, this kind of distracting encumbrance can be avoided if the proposed bill requiring bank managing directors and executive directors to be eligible for CBN top jobs only after five years of relinquishing their former positions is passed into law.
True, the current CBN Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, appointed from Zenith Bank where he was MD/CEO, has been a restrained systems man wary of rocking the boat. But the proposed new law is not about personalities. It is about strengthening the autonomy and professionalism of the apex bank.
