“On the domestic front, we also recall the rapid accumulation of local debts particularly through bond issuance by almost N2000bn within four years, without recourse for NASS approval. There is practically nothing to show for these loans, and it seems that these loans were incurred specifically for non-tangible purposes with dubious and immeasurable yardsticks!

Humanity is still intimidated by fears it inherited from prehistoric humans, as well as fears that are products of the technological advancement of civilization, including the fear of nuclear annihilation. Collective fear engenders herd instinct, and tends to encourage aggressively towards strangers. As I suggested a moment ago, fear stimulates cruel impulses, and hence promotes superstitious beliefs which appear to justify cruelty.

The weapons funded with the 2008 budget votes had largely been consolidated by the first quarter of 2009 and about mid May this year, the Military Joint Task Force (JTF) was sufficiently emboldened to embark on a major resurgence of its operations in the area; villages and erstwhile sleepy communities were ravaged, innocent men, women and children were slaughtered, community leaders and chiefs were arrested while others fled into the bush; the mansions of local beneficiaries of the proceeds of oil bunkerings were razed and these erstwhile government political collaborators were declared wanted and remained at large! Government reported the recovery of diaries, accounting records and other documents which listed the affiliates of the hunted ‘militants’.

The situation becomes even more curious when you recognize that the same CBN who is borrowing from the banks at more than 6% is also the same one guaranteeing interbank placements without the control meter of each bank’s reserve and gilt edge holdings! This also raises questions as to the $7bn shared between 14 banks by CBN under hitherto undisclosed terms.

In last week’s column, we invited Sanusi to take a closer look at the proposal in our paper titled “A Liberalised Foreign Exchange Market: and its Economic Benefit” Boyo/Ojomaikre 2002 to the National Economic Intelligence Committee (see www.geocities.com/lesleba) in which we recommended that CBN auditors be permanently embedded in the Treasury and Foreign Exchange Departments of each bank as the only way to guarantee that the information submitted by our banks are accurate and reflect a true position of their state of health.