Sanusi Lamido
The Central Bank of Nigeria has just released a list of chronic and unrepentant debtors that banks in the country should no longer give loan facilities. The list is like a Who’s Who of top Nigerian businessmen. It shows how deep the country has fallen in terms of corporate morality and reveals how badly the world’s most populous black country has been held up by the failure of leadership.
Despite not performing on the debts that had been taken over by the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria, some of the debtors were alleged to have devised underhand means of collecting further loans from the banking system. Such sacrilege strikes at the core of everything Nigeria stands for.
Blacklisting the culprits was, no doubt, courageous. But sincerely prosecuting them to serve as a deterrent to other evil-minded Nigerians is perhaps of paramount importance to the masses who toil under inhuman conditions to gather the wealth that are being so wickedly frittered. And, of course, bringing the debtors to justice is what will heal Nigeria’s corporate image which has been so badly injured by corruptions like this.
President Goodluck Jonathan should also show more than perfunctory interest in this matter. It is certainly beyond the CBN.