Although a couple of my secondary school classmates became bankers, I don’t remember that any of us confessed at any time that they were looking forward to a career in banking. There was however no shortage of those who had strongly stated ambitions to become doctors, engineers, lawyers and members of other such related liberal professions. We were in school at a time when it had just become possible to aspire to these professions which required a university degree and we found it inconceivable to even entertain any thought of not proceeding to a university with all possible speed after our Higher School Certificate examinations. We were confident or perhaps cocky enough to think we would pass our exams well enough to secure admission into a university, one of the new Nigerian universities which seemed to have arrived with independence. That ambition was well within our competence and in the end, only a handful of us did not get to attend a university. As far as we were aware at the time, you did not need a university degree to become a banker or perhaps more appropriately, a bank worker. This being the case, a banking career was thought to be well below our notice. Ironically, one of us who ended up in a bank did so only after he had taken a degree in Economics. For good measure however, he took early retirement from the bank and conformed as the rest of us had done by taking up another degree in law.
My first interaction with bankers took place far away from a banking hall and it was quite memorable for me nevertheless. Nigeria was a far more sporting nation then than she is now as there were a great many sports clubs playing their chosen sport with varying degrees of seriousness and skill. The Police and Prisons services for example, were powerhouses of sports and the Police football team was one of the most formidable football teams in the land whilst Ejoke, Abidoye and others from the Prisons Athletics Club thrilled the nation with their athletic prowess. These people were at least semi-professionals and belonged to an elite group of easily recognisable people who were talked about in glowing terms. However, most of those who took part in sports of an evening were no more than gifted or even not so gifted amateurs who came out to play their game for the sheer joy of doing so.
There were many sports clubs to be found in Lagos in the sixties, each of them associated with big companies, some of which had built clubhouses on expansive grounds with good facilities for various games. Shell, UAC, Ports Authority, Railways, to mention a few were in this group and members of their staff had use of these facilities. This was at a time when Lagosians did not spend half of their time in traffic jams and had some spare time on their hands after getting back home from work. At that time, Barclays Bank had a cricket team which came over to Igbobi College to offer the school team a game and give me the opportunity of rubbing shoulders with dyed in the wool bankers who, as far as I was concerned, lived in a world of their own. That afternoon however, we were united on the platform of the game of cricket. That game was of special significance for me as it was my first game for the school and we won handsomely. Games like that could also be important from career points of view as some school boy players were introduced to prospective employers in the course of such brief interactions.
In that period of the mid-sixties, bankers were few and very thin on the ground. They were surrounded by a mystique all of their own and were accorded a great deal of respect. They, together with doctors and clergymen were perennial writers of references for those seeking admission into educational institutions or those looking for employment in government establishments. They wore a cloak of respectability which could not be bought for love or money. Talking about money, bankers were not associated with this commodity except as custodians of money placed in their care by a trusting public. This is not to say that they were paupers by any stretch of the imagination as by the standards of the day, their paygrade was not to be sniffed at. What they did not do and perhaps could not even think of doing was to flaunt whatever change was clinking in their cavernous pockets. In other words, they as a group were self effacing almost to the point of anonymity.
In those days unlike now, banks were the source of housing loans and those who worked in banks had access to loans with which to build their own houses and from this point of view had no reason to entertain any fears about a decent roof over their heads. In other words, to be a banker was always a cynosure even if my friends and I were lamentably ignorant of the opportunities which existed in banks all around us in a world which revelled in academic achievement as guaranteed by a university degree.
That cricket match took place long before the indigenization decree was promulgated in those heady days of the seventies. It was indeed a few months before our rather unreflective soldiers went right off their heads and seized power for themselves. Power which they had no idea how to use properly and only ended up driving the country into a gully. There are many who think that so many years later, we have not yet been able to manoeuvre our way out of that gully. Now, we have politicians, many of them so called because they have been brought up in the age of military anomy and cannot appreciate the rule of law. In the twilight period of real democratic rule in Nigeria and because most commercial institutions were international in terms of ownership, the Barclays Bank team on that day was made up of both Nigerians and expatriates, some of whom had lived and worked in Nigeria for decades. A few years later, all the expatriates had gone and the bank itself had become a government parastatal as were other banks and a new and patently uncomfortable era had begun.
Banks are the powerhouses of any modern economy and it was soon clear that the government parastatals masquerading as banks were totally out of their depth and were not fit for purpose. The bankers were now civil servants who wore slightly more stylish suits than the real civil servants who worked in government ministries. They continued to run their banks after a fashion but had no time for cricket or any other games. The days of sports participation were long gone, swallowed up by the fumes of history and the exhaust clouds generated on the constipated streets of Lagos by thousands of idling internal combustion engines.
By the middle of the eighties, the Nigerian economy was on life support and against the advice of the great Nigerian public, the flaky Nigerian military government of the day invited the IMF to repair the broken economy which they were trying to manage after a fashion.
The first sign that we had escaped the frying pan only to land in a roaring fire was the devaluation of the Naira. This generated an unhealthy appetite for hard currency as shown by the sharpness of currency speculation which followed the devaluation. Foreign currency became a commodity which was bought and sold every week. It was sold by the Central Bank and bought by speculators who promptly sold them at enormous profit to people who needed foreign exchange with which to import all manner of stuff into the country. Banking services became severely limited but not exclusively so, to making hard currency available. At the same time, all manner of banks, or as they were called, finance houses started opening their doors to all manner of gamblers who played with money rather than chips. You deposited money into one of these finance houses on the promise of fantastic returns in a few months. Many were taken in by these rosy promises but it was not long before the air was filled with the lamentation of those who had fallen victim to the sharks; very well suited sharks it has to be said, with the audacity to run a scam yielding them vast sums of money within a very short time. The Nigerian banking landscape was changed forever. All those careful, conservative men of substance who entered the bank with their school certificate tucked in their file and rose steadily, if unspectacularly, over a period of thirty years or more to run their banks were pushed out of their berths, to be replaced by very bright and impatient young men and women with MBAs and banking degrees from all those British polytechnics which had been almost magically transformed into brand new universities in the Thatcher years. It did not matter what you studied in the university, all you needed to get on in the so called technologically driven new generation banks was the ambition to attract money to your bank which was ready to pay you handsome dividends for your troubles.
We are now in the age of the banks and Nigerian bankers, who through thick and thin are laughing all the way to the bank. They are not likely to be distracted by indulgence in such untemunerative frolics as a game of cricket on a Saturday afternoon.