By Providence Obuh

Shareholder Activist, Alhaji Gbadebo Olatokunbo:

CBN building

During the last banks’ crash, the then CBN Governor, Lamido  Sanusi, published the names of banks’-debtors,which made him the enemy of the powerful-blocs; while many of the then debtors threatened to go to court.

Surprisingly, none of them did, instead they resorted to repaying some of their debts to the banks,while many were yet to settle their indebtedness fully till today.

The grudges of these debtors to Sanusi were part of what led to his forced exit from the CBN, yet these problem is still hunting our economy and they have to be dealt with fast.

I respectfully appeal to the CBN Management not to waste time in going public with the list; while l sincerely appeal to our banks-debtors to please start repayment of the debts, so that their names will not make the list, because we can’t afford not to collect our money, since they’ve refused to follow the line of honour in-order to restore our banks back to risk-free-bracket, while we call on CBN to extend the recovery exercise to the attention of the Almighty AMCON, master of Bad-Debts collector .

The C BN gave notice that they want to publish names but banks are skeptical about publishing names and there are some people that will collect money from a bank and  they would not want to pay and then they will move to another bank to collect money. That is what happened the last time we had capital market crash that affected the banks.

CBN said that they want to list the names of debtors but the information we got is that the bank does not want the CBN to do that, but when Sanusi did that, instead of the government to support him, they did not. Time has changed and that is corruption, how can you collect other people money and you are spending it and anybody who wants to talk about  it you shut them down because of the power you have.

I am encouraging the CBN to publish and list the names. The last time, those big wigs said they will go to court for CBN to have published their names because they dont have business with it. All they eventually did was  to  negotiate with the banks and  began  gradual repayment to AMCON.

Sir Sunny Nwosu, National Coordinator of the Independent Shareholders Association of Nigeria (ISAN)

If CBN says they want to publish the list of debtors and they are the regulator of the banks, they must have seen through their statute that they have the power to do that and if that will help to recover the huge debt being owed by customers  it is okay by me . I want to believe that there is a relationship between a bank and its customers even before CBN comes into it.

I believe that relationship is between a bank and its client and therefore they must employ all available opportunity within the relationship to know why the customer is defaulting in  repaying whatever he/she have taken. If it is a deliberate thing, there is nothing wrong in publishing it, so that shareholders and customers will know that this one is owing deliberately and they will be able to weigh the value of such money and why  they are not willing to pay.

But if a customer is defaulting because of some economic problems, this same bank that have relationship with the client should go in and advise the customer as to how to get out of the problem. In some cases the bank will have to put in  additional money to save the company, so depending on the discussion that they are going to have and depending on what the outcome of the discussion is.