Central Bank Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi yesterday said he won’t renew his contract when it expires in June next year.
Sanusi, who was appointed by late President Umaru Musa Yar’adua in June 2009, said it was never his intention to stay longer than one term.
Sanusi 51, whose appointed came in the midst of a debt crisis rescued the banking industry from near- collapse four years ago.
He fired the chief executives of eight lenders within four months of taking office after an audit found evidence of mismanagement and reckless lending. He’s pushed for stability in the currency and helped bring inflation down below 10 percent.
Sanusi led the Monetary Policy Committee in increasing the benchmark interest rate by six percentage points to a record 12 percent from September 2010 to October 2011 to bolster the currency and curb inflation.
Bismarck Rewane chief executive officer of Financial Derivatives Co, a Lagos-based business adviser, commenting on Sanusi by phone yesterday said: “That quality of character, that boldness is a quality that will be difficult to find amongst policy makers in Nigeria.”
“He has a strong personality and a lot of people invested in the country just because of the personal relationship and the trust in Sanusi, and the confidence that Sanusi inspires,” Samir Gidio, an emerging-markets strategist at Standard Bank Group Ltd said by phone from Lagos.
In 2009, former President Yar’Adua didn’t name Sanusi as a replacement to Chukwuma Soludo until two days before his term ended.
In December 2010, lawmakers demanded Sanusi apologize for saying a quarter of the government’s spending on overheads went to parliament and that was damaging for the economy. He refused, saying his estimates were correct.
Last year lawmakers attempted to curtail the bank’s powers by proposing an amendment to the Central Bank of Nigeria Act that would strip Sanusi of his position as chairman of the bank’s board. They also pushed to include more external members on the board and have parliament approve the bank’s budget.
More recently, he criticized China’s role in Africa, saying it’s contributing to “deindustrialization and underdevelopment” in Africa saying the continent must shake off its “romantic view of China” and see it as a competitor that’s “capable of the same forms of exploitation as the west,” Sanusi wrote in the London-based Financial Times on March 11. (Bloomberg)
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