A Reaction to Tunde Fagbenle on His view on Sanusi Lamido (II) by Iroabuchi Onwuka

By Iroabuchi Onwuka

It is no doubt common place, that all kinds of rift exists in the Banking in the world, such rift may no doubt have exists in Nigeria society, and just like other rift in the banking world, Nigeria which bears itself in plain history. For not many will choose to avoid the indelicacy of the Nigerian Civil War, the caprices of property acquisition of much of eastern Nigeria and the confiscation of their bank accounts by Obafemi Awolowo, who for many years, blocked the salary of civil servants after the war, many of them still worked without pay. The pension earned by the Easterners before the eve of Nigerian civil war remained unredeemed. Many of these people died in their hundreds of thousands while the world watched, left without direction in terms of financing, and left without an institution for many years.

The war came to an end in 1970, and from 1970 began the decade of reconstruction which inadvertently formulated the mindset of Nigerian society. It is in these recovery years that the significant rift between the Nigerians began to appear, the rift was between those who became the courier of Nigerian Banks during and after the war, and those who earned their pittance through ‘small cracks’ of lending and family borrowing, through the ‘inlet’ of trade and trans-border trade, through caveat emptor; the smaller units of businesses scraping around the larger, the law forbidding the expansion and the ratio in all things for space and rights which impeded mid cap companies. Such adverse business environment, largely out of mistrust eventually created a sense of business management, more like a form of attitude to business and to living which the banks completely endowed from the 70’s onwards. By the early eighties, few years after the fall of Shah of Iran, the Shell Company was readying to break in big in Nigeria and there was new and newer necessity of other banks.

The much of Nigerian banking can be described in three categories, one the Government managed, the Commercial banks which had their horns from the civil war era, and the Investment Banks which began to respond to the need of change in the larger world. The curtain dividing the east from the rest may fallen by this time, but the rift was established, so much so that Banks were a quasi property of certain people, who may now be called Old economy, the Commercial Markets, the First Banks and the Union Banks. In future as better stability of the country is forged, there will likely emerge other banks in the country that will conduct social Industrial programs and development in many of its forms. But the rise of military in Nigeria, in an age of oil boom gave birth to Investment Banks, initially and ultimately owned by Northerners but this time, private families with long roots to the bigger banks gradually emerged.

The expanded nature of the world business in the 80’s at a time when Nigerian oil began to make headway in the world, enabled Nigerians of the Investment grade to earn their ranks through the stock market and through international trans-border trade and in end, even attempted with help from Lebanese business group to provide interest rate for many francophone countries. Such attempt made these Nigerians soft targets for the neighbors and in places Cameroun they faced open hostility. It also led to the first and formal fracas between Igbos, Ijaws, certain Urhobos, and Syrians and Lebanese. These Nigerians also warned against the impact of Euro, citing that francophone countries had very little to earn from the sub-categorization of their West African Markets if the franc is pulled. But they felt it necessary to outdo these new Nigerians and many of these Nigerians exited from these areas, poured into Lagos and some parts of the east as at early 90’s.