IF banks cheated customers to the tune of between N6 billion and N8 billion in one year alone, it would appear that there are too many cheats in our banking halls. It is just as well that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the banking regulator, has checkmated them.
CBN Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, at the 2013 Isaac Moghalu Foundation (IMOF) Lecture and Symposium in Abuja, disclosed that in 2012 alone, Nigerian banks had cheated their customers to the tune of N6 billion, although the actual amount was found later to be N8 billion. But thanks to Hajia Umma Aminu Dutse, the CBN’s director of consumer protection, who ensured that the apex bank forced the erring banks to refund the money to the affected accounts.
In tandem with the lecture’s 2013 theme, “Women in leadership, the education pipeline”, Mallam Sanusi was all praise for Hajiya Dutse: “The director of consumer protection has recovered over N6 billion in the last one year for customers that were cheated by banks. She takes sides with banks’ customers. Even when I plead with her to be gentle with the banks, she is very ruthless”. That is the way it should be. Banking is essentially a trust business. A situation in which banking halls are populated by smart alecs scheming on how to rip off unsuspecting customers, is unacceptable.
So, thumbs up for the CBN for detecting this unwholesome practice and ensuring that cheated depositors got back their money. But which banks are involved in such sharp practices? Or is it that every bank operating in Nigeria has been stealing from their customers?
Inasmuch as guilty banks deserve all the knocks, just announcing the foiling of a scam without announcing the guilty gives the impression that everyone in the industry could have been involved. That is not fair to the innocent banks; and certainly, it does not reinforce good banking behaviour.
For the guilty parties to quietly refund money they had attempted to steal amounts to no more than punishment in the closet. Future culprits are bound to take their chances, sure that such misdemeanours would hardly be public knowledge – so will the attendant odium and possible loss of business.
However, only customers who felt cheated and wrote petitions got their cases investigated; and their monies refunded. That, of course, simply means that hundreds, perhaps thousands of others who never complained could still have got their monies creamed off. That is not good enough. The CBN should somehow devise very effective means of independent verification that would routinely take care of such abuses.
It is important to note that prevention is always better than cure. These incidences of fraud and allied cheating are only a result of lowered professional standards, especially in banking ethics and integrity.
By all means, those involved must be punished. But that can only do in the short run. In the long run, the country’s banking industry must get a moral rebirth, if it must be deepened to capture funds from the huge informal economy. That way, more and more Nigerians would have enough trust in the banks to deposit their monies therein, as well as do other banking transactions.
Two bodies are crucial to this banking rebirth: the regulator, CBN and the professional body, the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (CIBN). To make CBN’s job easier, it should continue to preach the gospel of banking integrity; and the imperative of restoring in Nigerian banking system the pristine trust on which banking was founded.
But nothing would appear more effective – and dignifying – than self-and peer-correction. That is where the CIBN comes in. It owes it a duty to its members and to the survival of the only industry from which they earn their living to ensure ethical reorientation and revival.
