Chike-Obi: Tinubu Must Appoint Persons Principled Enough to Resign When Forced to Execute Bad Policies

Says branch banking will disappear in 10 years

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

A former Chief Executive Officer of the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) and  current Chairman of Fidelity , Nigeria, Mustafa Chike-Obi, yesterday urged President Bola Tinubu to appoint persons who will be willing to resign when they disagree with a policy they are compelled to execute.

Speaking on Arise Television, THISDAY’s broadcast arm, Chike-Obi stated that it was unacceptable for an appointee of government to implement policies they do not believe in and cannot defend.

While many aides under the Muhammadu Buhari administration thought it was unsustainable to retain fuel subsidy, the president was for paying the massive subsidy on petrol, a policy which the ministers, advisers and heads of agencies implemented although they disagreed.

But Chike-Obi argued that an appointee’s resignation could make the government review a bad policy, maintaining that it was wrong for a government official to blame the president for a policy which they executed themselves.

“You (government official) can resign and say I will not administer this policy and that may in fact convince the president to take a second look at that policy. But when you sit there and administer that policy you yourself know was bad for Nigeria, we can’t afford it anymore.

“And that resignation itself is a statement to the president that you really believe this is the bad policy. I think that the new government should employ people who are principled enough to defend policies they personally believe it,” he contended.

Chike-Obi also asserted that the fuel subsidy removal was a good thing,  but that it should have been better handled by the new government. However, he added that Tinubu has smart people around him who should know what to do.

“Let me say this, Mr. Tinubu’s political philosophy, all his life has been to be kind, to the lowest and most vulnerable.

“So in this subsidy removal, his people around him should have been sensitive to the fact that we should do things for the poor people first before we remove it so abruptly.

“ I think they will address it. There are a lot of smart people around him, they will address it. I think in the next 30 days, we will see a number of interventions, I believe,” he explained.

He also maintained that until Tinubu releases the list of those he is going to work with, it would be difficult to make an informed projection on several sectors of the economy.

“I know a lot of the people around the president. I have known him for years, I have a relationship with the president and I have tremendous respect and affection for him.

“So, I can’t answer your question until I see  the team he has around him and  the policies that they talk about. But if you ask me, I’m extremely optimistic. So, let’s see his team and policies,” he noted.

On the challenge of banking in Nigeria with the current fuel price hike, Chike-Obi predicted that in the next decade there would be no branch banking, arguing that with the advent of Fintechs, banks will be highly automated.

“I think the world is moving generally to non-traditional banking. Branch banking is going to be a thing of the past in the next 10 or 15 years. When I’m in the US, I don’t think I’ve gone to my bank branch in the last five years, maybe once or twice.

“So from the customer’s point of view, we hope that customers are using the branches less to lessen the impacts from the customer side that higher cost of transportation and all that will cause,” he said.

However, he stated that banks in Nigeria have largely depended on diesel to run their branches for a long time, pointing out that aside customers being impacted by higher prices, there won’t be a huge impact of the pump price increase on banks in the country.

“ I don’t think it would be as big as people fear. on the diesel side, this has happened on the regular for a long time. So our cost of running branches is largely diesel, and diesel is unregulated. So I don’t think that there’s going to be much of an impact on banking, but there’ll be an impact on our customers because the cost of living is going to go up.

 “And as we all have calculated, the impact on transportation fuel is going to make some employees not to come to work because their salaries are less than the cost of transportation.

“So, all of those things have to be reviewed. And the thing to do is to have  a holistic policy on the things that Nigeria must do, which is to index the minimum wage to inflation,” he explained.

 Arguing that a unified exchange rate was mandatory, he noted that it required skills and deftness to administer so as not to cause untold hardship.

 “So I think that unified exchange rate is mandatory. How you get there is what requires skill, governance  and policy,” he said, adding that this could even be done in instalments.