Tolu Ogunlesi
Charles Soludo faced a lot of criticism for his attempted redenomination, and also for the banking consolidation—great as it was, it had its strong critics (including allegations that it was Anti-a-section-of-the-country), and there were many ‘losers’ as well. It wasn’t all rosy, even though the passage of time now makes it seem that way.
People have forgotten, but in January 2015, NOI (through her Spox) described Soludo as “the man who presided over the worst mismanagement of Nigeria’s banking sector…”, and also said that under him, “the banking sector was brought to its knees and required a massive bailout by Nigerian tax payers.” I also recall that @234next had a series of investigative reports against Soludo when he was CBN Gov.
When he left office (basically denied a second term by Yar’Adua), there were revelations that suggested that beneath the surface, the consolidation was not as great as it appeared. (Recall that the first big task of Soludo’s successor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi was to deal with the specter of massive potential failures in several banks).
Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (SLS) it was who brought ‘risk management’ to bear on the sector.
SLS was also a big ‘interventionist’ – established the Power and Airline Intervention Facility (PAIF) in March 2010, established NIRSAL 2011, really expanded CBN’s intervention footprint, including in education. SLS was also big on defending the Naira, and devoted quite a chunk of FX reserves to this (also had the $ to pull it off—record oil prices).
Like his predecessor he faced significant criticism, and many have now forgotten the difficult circumstances in which he left office—two queries (and an eventual suspension) by the Presidency, and a lengthy list of accusations against him by Nigeria’s accounting standards regulator, led at the time by a man who’s now back on the beat investigating his successor.
Enter Godwin Emefiele (GE) the first two-termer in the 4th Republic. In the area of ‘interventions’, he took what he inherited from SLS to a whole new level: Agriculture esp. Also did a lot of Manufacturing and Infrastructure Interventions, like the RSSF he established in Dec 2014 (which ended up supporting major Infra achievements like the Lagos Blue and Red Lines), and Anchor Borrowers a year later (which supported many smallholder farmers but also faced big implementation challenges). CACOVID, Creative Economy, etc.
He was also pivotal to Dangote Refinery success. He also tried very hard to defend the Naira, but unlike Soludo and SLS, had a much more limited FX arsenal for this. Also, you cannot discuss the GE era at CBN without centering Covid, and what it both compelled and allowed him to do. E.g. surge in Ways & Means. And in this regard, it wasn’t very different from what Central Banks around the world were all doing, in response to the unprecedented challenge that was Covid.
Unlike his predecessors, however, GE dabbled bigly into politics, while in office. Not sure why he did so, but he did. And he’s surely paying a big price for this. Perhaps getting a second term gave him a sense of invincibility, I don’t know. With benefit of hindsight, the second term appears to have been his undoing. I wonder what this means for the future—perhaps we will never again see a 2-term CBN Governor.
A lot of the criticism Emefiele is facing today, is not new.
His predecessors faced same. He’s not the first to be accused of presiding over the “worst” era in the CBN. Almost feels like a rite of passage for Governors. His, however, is on another level entirely, admittedly because of his politics. It’s interesting to watch how things play out. We have not yet seen the final (and NUANCED) assessment of the Emefiele era at the CBN. Fingers crossed. The beat goes on…
Tolu Ogunlesi is a former Journalist and was Special Assistant on New Media to former President Muhammadu Buhari
