After his unceremonious ouster from the Central Bank of Nigeria
late February, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi has continued to insist that a huge
amount of money is missing from the Federal Government coffers and the
Goodluck Jonathan Administration owes the country a responsibility to
get to the root of the alleged misappropriation.
This New York
Times piece examines Sanusi’s call for investigation and allegations of
recklessness, incompetence, abuse of mandate and criminal acts of
negligence leveled against the Kano prince.
Read below:
Even in a country where untold oil wealth disappears into the pockets
of the elite, the oil corruption scheme he was investigating seemed
outsize — and he threatened to lay it bare at a meeting with Nigeria’s
top bankers.
The rabble-rouser was none other than the
governor of the country’s central bank. Weeks later, however, he was
out, fired by Nigeria’s president in an episode that has shaken the
Nigerian economy, filled newspapers and airwaves here, and even inspired
a rare street demonstration.
The bankers were going to have
to open their books, the governor, Lamido Sanusi, warned them at the
recent meeting. He wanted to see where the money was going — $20 billion
from oil sales that, mysteriously, was not making its way to the
treasury, in a country that could soon be declared Africa’s biggest
economy and already attracts the most direct foreign investment on the
continent, according to the United Nations.
But his
suspicions were cutting too close, Mr. Sanusi said — too close to an
oil-politics nexus that both feeds the political establishment in
Nigeria, in his view and that of analysts, and deprives the country of
vital revenue.
The charge of missing oil money is not new in
Nigeria. In recent years, government commissions, parliamentary
inquiries and civil society groups have all pointed to serious
shortfalls in the disbursement of oil revenues. Their findings have been
ignored.
This time, the accusations appear not to be going away: Never before has an official at Mr. Sanusi’s level made them.
In interviews here, Mr. Sanusi gave a detailed account of the events
that he said led to his ouster on Feb. 20, a dismissal that continues to
depress the country’s currency and frighten investors. He said his
warning to the bankers had been reported straight back to the threatened
seat of power in the country’s capital, Abuja.
It was too
much, he said. With his accusations, which outside analysts consider
credible, the soft-spoken, bow-tied central banker appeared to have
penetrated to the heart of the country’s entrenched corruption problem.
In 2009, Mr. Sanusi took aim at Nigeria’s failing banking sector,
shutting down fraudulent banks, uncovering theft that led to an
unprecedented conviction, and earning trust in international financial
markets. He was named central bank governor of the year by The Banker
magazine in 2011, and is a suited-up member of his country’s
establishment, as an heir to the position of emir in the ancient
northern city of Kano, one of Nigeria’s highest-status designations.
But then he began taking on the government oil agency, which
determines whether oil-dependent Nigeria rises or falls. Specifically,
he accused the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation — the agency that
buys, sells, regulates and produces the country’s oil — of not turning
over earnings to the country’s central bank. The country is Africa’s
largest oil exporter, oil prices were steady or rising, yet Nigeria’s
financial reserves were falling. It was a mystery. The money was
missing. Mr. Sanusi said he feared an eventual collapse of Nigeria’s
currency.
Backed by calculations, he presented his findings
to a Nigerian Senate committee early in February. “A substantial amount
of money has gone,” Mr. Sanusi said in an interview at the mansion
reserved for the country’s central banker, which he will soon have to
leave. “I wasn’t just talking about numbers. I showed it was a scam.”
At a time when political energy in Africa’s most populous country is
focused on next year’s elections — and staying in power is costly for a
governing party that functions as a patronage machine — Mr. Sanusi knew
exactly which interests he had menaced, he said. He had been warned to
“cool down.
“By making N.N.P.C. an issue now, the source of
money for financing elections is threatened,” Mr. Sanusi said, referring
to the petroleum corporation. “If this is stopped, there will be no
money to finance the elections.”
On the other hand, if it was
not stopped, the risk to Nigeria’s economy was grave, the central
banker suggested. “It was critical that we stop this hemorrhage,” he
said. “Otherwise, we can’t maintain stability. Reserves had gone way
down. We would watch the naira collapse,” he said of the nation’s
currency.
Alarmed, Mr. Sanusi said, he went in front of
Nigeria’s top banking heads for a semimonthly meeting on Feb. 11 and
“threatened to open the books of the bankers, to trace the money.” He
suspected some were laundering stolen oil money.
“Some of
them were not giving information about their accounts,” the central
banker said. “I told them I would order a special examination.”
One of the bankers at the meeting said, referring to the Central Bank
of Nigeria, “He made it clear to them that the C.B.N. would need to
unravel what was going on, and they should cooperate.”
Many
of the bankers became angry. “One of us said, ‘What next?’ “ a second
banker said. “There was a general heaviness. He spoke tough.” Both
bankers requested anonymity.
Panicked, several of the bankers
went straight to the government, Mr. Sanusi said. Two of the bankers —
he would not identify them — “went and reported to the petroleum
minister,” he said. And at that moment, his days were numbered.
“The strategy of the government was to discredit the messenger,” he
said. The Nigerian president “doesn’t want me to bring out any more
information that would get them into trouble.”
Mr. Sanusi’s account is “untrue,” a spokesman for President Goodluck Jonathan said.
“Mr. Sanusi has been making all kinds of claims to project himself as a
victim,” the spokesman, Reuben Abati, said in an email, accusing the
former bank governor of “financial recklessness, abuse of mandate,
incompetence and criminal acts of negligence.”
Mr. Sanusi has
not been charged with any crimes, and the most Mr. Jonathan held him
responsible for in a series of counteraccusations that emerged after the
bank governor raised an alarm over the oil money was having perhaps
“sidestepped civil-service rules.”
Outside analysts appear to be in large agreement that Mr. Sanusi’s claim of vast missing oil revenues is plausible.
Nigeria’s state oil sales “feature undue complexity, extensive
discretion and well-documented flaws,” Revenue Watch, a group focused on
natural-resource management, wrote in an examination of the central
banker’s declarations. “In such a system, the line between mismanagement
and corruption is difficult to draw, as shortcomings in process often
benefit specific private interests.”
One such “shortcoming”
was laid bare by Mr. Sanusi last month to the parliamentary committee: a
phony subsidy on kerosene that he determined to be a racket, costing
the Nigerian treasury billions of dollars and greatly benefiting what he
called a “syndicate” of marketers and unknown others. Mr. Sanusi showed
that any official subsidy on kerosene had long since been abolished,
that the petroleum corporation was nonetheless selling kerosene to
marketers at less than a third of its purchase price on the
international market and that the Nigerian marketers were then selling
kerosene to the public at prices 300 to 500 percent above what they had
paid for it.
“It’s just a big scam,” Mr. Sanusi said in the interview. “The amount is shared by a cabal.”
Though his official term would have ended in June anyway, Mr. Sanusi
said, he is challenging his removal in court. In a judiciary that is
only lightly insulated from political pressure, the outcome is
uncertain, though perhaps not with the wider public. One of the bankers
at the Feb. 11 meeting said: “For me personally, I don’t think there’s
anything wrong with the position he has taken. We are Nigerians. We owe
it to this country that things are run properly.”
One of
Nigeria’s leading activists, Tunde Bakare, a founder of the
pro-democracy organization Save Nigeria Group, said: “This is going to
be tried in the court of public opinion. We can’t wish this matter away.
Twenty billion dollars is not going to go away overnight.”
