The immediate past Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, gave me hope that not all our elites are sectional some days back. Sanusi’s intervention over the move to relocate a few departments of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)to Lagos came at a time some elites from the North chose to jettison sound reasoning. Abuja, he said, is a federal capital not a northern issue. What matters is that the decision must be principled and once this condition is satisfied, ethnic and religious bigots can shout all they want.
It is not only the CBN plan that has exposed these elites; they have also been exposed by the decision to move the headquarters of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) from Abuja to Lagos and their hullabaloo over the choice of a Southerner, His Excellency, Nyesom Wike, as the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). Wike is the first Southerner in decades to get the position and the likes of Sheik Ahmad Gumi found it sacrilegious.
These guys have over the years acted as if the FCT Minister post is their birthright. To further their campaigns, they have resorted to reading senseless meanings into every action of the Southern minister. Because of their parochial interest, there have been unnecessary backlash following the demolition of shanties and the chasing away of marauding Keke drivers from the capital city. Some even believe that the recent kidnappings in the FCT is all part of the game. It seems the tactic is to distract Wike from doing the job which he accepted and is willing to do with patriotic verve and unwavering commitment for which President Bola Tinubu has given him the needed support. Wike has taken decisions that have endeared him to the president, who has in turn supported him in many ways than one, such as the exception of the FCT from the Treasury Single Account (TSA), and speedy approvals to enable him purchase security equipment in the face of the recent security crisis. What is left is for Nigerians, especially our brothers from the North to give him a chance to restore the lost glory of Abuja, just the way he did in Rivers State.
Justice Akinola Aguda, who led the committee that chose Abuja as a centralised capital for Nigeria, must be turning in his grave now that some elites from the North, including the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and Senator Ali Ndume, are making it look as if Abuja is for the North, rather than a melting pot for Nigeria that it was planned to be.
For the intervention of Sanusi, one would have thought that the North was up in arms against the South but the ex-CBN governor has shown us that these guys are simply playing politics and he has advised that politics should never be allowed to take over sound judgment.
The CBN’s explanation of its decision is clear enough and should never have generated any hubris. The bank said the action plan was to optimise the Bank’s other premises.
Five of the institutions 17 departments, specifically Banking Supervision, Other Financial Institutions Supervision, Consumer Protection Department, Payment System Management Department and Financial Policy Regulations Department, are expected to move to Lagos.
A former Deputy Governor of the bank, Dr. Kingsley Moghalu, in a post on X, explained that the CBN’s Lagos office was inaugurated 12 years ago but had been underutilised and added that the decision was logical because the affected departments primarily oversee market entities in Lagos. This is also Sanusi’s position.
The ex-CBN boss said: “The credit for the design and the contract for the new Lagos building goes to Charles Soludo. But it is true that I did the formal foundation laying ceremony when JB brought the building to ground level, and I opened the building and used it before I left the CBN… Moving certain functions to the Lagos office ( which is bigger than the Abuja head office) is an eminently sensible move.
“In my mind what I would have done was to move FSS and most of Operations to Lagos such that the two Deputy Governors would be largely operating out of Lagos or, even if they were more in Abuja , the bulk of their operational staff would be in Lagos.
Economic policy, Corporate services and all the departments reporting to the Governor directly such as Strategy, Audit, Risk management, Governors’ office etc would remain in Abuja. It makes eminent strategic sense. And I would have done this if I had stayed.”
Sanusi said “all this noise is absolutely unnecessary” and added that “moving staff to the Lagos office to streamline operations and make them more effective and reduce cost is a normal prerogative of management”.
Sanusi gave an interesting insight into the brouhaha. According to him, many CBN employees are children of politically-exposed persons and “their Abuja life and businesses are more important than the CBN work”.
The CBN, he said, is just an address for them and they would rather leave the CBN than forfeit their spoilt Abuja life. He urged the CBN to implement the decision to get rid of those elements because “they are dangerous for the bank’s future”.
In the case of the FAAN, Obiageli Orah, its Director of Public Affairs and Consumer Protection, said: “Those affected by the decision to move the headquarters to Abuja have since returned to Lagos as there is no office space for them in Abuja. It was ill-advised in the first place to move the headquarters to Abuja when there was no single FAAN building in Abuja to accommodate all of them at once.”
She added that retaining the status quo would mean abandoning “the old FAAN building in Lagos to rot away and to use its scarce resources to rent an office space in Abuja for millions of naira of public money when in actual fact more than sixty percent of its activities are in Lagos given the huge passenger volume of the Lagos airports. The stakeholders and the Minister decided against that and to save the country from this waste.”
In all of these chaos, all Nigerians need to fight for Abuja as our FCT. The city doesn’t belong to the North alone contrary to what the ACF’s National Publicity Secretary, Prof. T. A. Muhammad-Baba, said that the decisions were to under-develop the North. It is wrong to say the decisions don’t fit into any disturbing pattern of antagonistic actions against the interests of the North.
Nigerians must insist that the decision to have Abuja as FCT is for Nigeria and not for the North and Abuja is for us all. So, interpreting these actions as against the North is not good for our country. As right-thinking Nigerians like Sanusi have noted, we must all insist Abuja is the capital of Nigeria and not the North. It belongs to us all and moving departments or agencies for administrative convenience should not be interpreted as anti-North. The time to end this curious sense of ownership is now.
●Worlu, PhD, former Commissioner for Housing, Rivers State, writes from Port Harcourt.
