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Accept, Your
Excellency, my
hearty congratulations on your recent appointment as the Governor of the Central Bank of Nig-eria. I wish you bountiful strength of mind and body as you settle down for the real business of governing the banking sector of the economy. I will be engaging you through this platform on a number of policy issues.
This piece addresses a major factor which you have to tackle with a large heart and great sense of responsibility. It is about the CBN workers retrenched in 1996 and 1998. I am one of the numerous media men and women who have steadfastly backed the group to sustain the struggle, convinced of the righteousness of their cause. Their lot is a brazen case of man’s inhumanity to man and height of corporate cruelty.
The media is not alone in support of these helpless and traumatized Nigerians being treated by the CBN as though they are prisoners of war. The two arms of the National Assembly, Office of the Head of Service, Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Nigerian Labour Congress, National Union of Banks, Insurance and Financial Institutions Em-ployees, Human Rights Organisations, Traditional rulers including the Ooni of Ife, the Emirs of Kano and Bauchi, Yoruba Council of Elders, Religious leaders including His Lordship, Bishop Gbonigi and His Grace, J.P. Akinola, the Primate of the Anglican Communion, some Federal Cabinet members and other eminent personalities, have at various times intervened on the matter but your predecessor hardened his heart and exhibited phar-aohic stubbornness. I pray you will make a difference.
The Federal High Court has further intervened on the matter and given judgment in favour of the ex-workers. The CBN appealed, whereas the Court of Appeal, denounced her for coming to the throne justice with dirty hands. The bank lost on all the five grounds of appeal. What next? The case remains hanging on the CBN as an albatross, awaiting to be disposed off by your kind of leader, who dares while others shy.
Dear Governor, corporate watchers have often felt embarrassed over the scandalous conduct of the CBN in industrial relation, manifesting the worst form of corporate citizenship. In this time and season, when Nigeria is rebranding herself, her cities and institutions, the CBN seems to be the only institution that does not feel bothered about her image and identity. In this season when banks like Union Bank and Omega bank among others, are gathering their ex-staffers as part of their strategic resources and drawing them closer into their corporate families, rehabilitating them, giving them a sense of belonging and rendering to them moral and financial supports, the CBN is degenerating into a church of Antioch, where members serving and retired, sing discordant tunes. Every corporate entity that has an image to protect is often shy to wash its dirty lines in the public, but the CBN has become a sacred masquerade that dances naked in the market square, rampaging from one court to another, fighting war of blame. In the last five years, the bank has been engulfed in one legal battle or the other with its ex-staff. If she is not fighting with the pensioners, she will be at war with the rationalised staff, making the public wonder what really is the problem with the bank.
As you settle down for business, and as you poise for the restructuring of the Bank, you need to take special note of the imperative for a fundamental overhaul of your corporate and legal units. There is strong indication that the Bank’s Legal department trades with cases. For pecuniary interest, the department would not give sincere, honest and quality legal advice. It often prompts the bank to go into blame-worthy litigations which even a Diploma Law student should know would not produce any favourable outcome. This has contributed in diminishing the image of the bank. Take a statistics of the bank’s involvement in litigation, you will find that even though the bank is always in court with attendant bad publicity, she has never won a single case as far as one’s memory goes. You should make an independent and objective assessment of this retrenchment palavar and not allow some officers to continue to feed fat on the misfortune of ex-staff. You should not permit the persistence of bad publicity for the bank and the waste of tax payers money on frivolous and blameworthy litigations.
With the Presidency, Head of Service, the National Assembly and the two CBN in-house panels, affirming that the workers were victimised, and whereas the court has denounced the CBN for its corporate wickedness and dehuma-nisation of its former servants who served her cons-cientiously, no further arg-ument is needed to prove the righteousness of the ex-workers’ agitation. All that needs to be said is that equity forbids that a fundamental wrong such as the instant case exemplifies, should go without a remedy.
Your Excellency, I hold it to be criminally unjust for any person enthroned into high office through God’s infinite mercies to turn same office as an instrument of oppression and dehum-anisation, jeopa-rdising future aspiration of young and intelligent officers, using retrenchment to vent prej-udices and tendencies that are malafide. Such was the case with Dr. Paul Ogwuma. It is equally bad to discover a case of injustice and pretend blind or remain indifferent on the excuse that the problem antedated one’s administration just as Chief Sanusi did.
Let it be emphasised that down-sizing is not evil perse. Members of a corporate entity must leave an establishment at one time or the other, be they executives or other ranks. They may disengage either by retir-ement, retrenchment, dism-issal or even death. But in whichever way one leaves an organisation, let it be seen to be fair and just in the eyes of every right thinking person of ordinary prudence. The three arms of government and the public are unanimous in their verdict that the CBN failed this test in the said retrenchment exercises.
Your Excellency, I can affirm that among the retre-nchees are quitessence of rounded education and first class brains. Their lofty dreams were thwarted at the flowering stage of their career, leaving them to suffer mid-life crises and unfulfilled career path. Worst still, with a number of them putting less than 10 years in service they were left empty handed. No pension in today’s difficulty society, where salary earners find it difficult to survive, I feel the pains of this category of your ex-staff, thrown out of job without pension. Any form of settlement without a special emphasis on this group of retrenchees will amount to peace of Jonah in the womb of the whale, which of course, is a meaningless peaceful settlement.
If the cabal in the CBN will avail you of the unadulterated report of both Mayaiki and Dr. Musa led Retrenchment Review Pan-els, you will find their reco-mmendations useful. On a good authority, the reco-mmendation is that the bank should re-instate those that are able and still willing to work; handsomely com-pensate those who will not be eligible for reinstatement; pension those who are not enjoying pensions and assist them to secure loans to set up small and medium scale enterprises. I endorse this recommendation since it is in accord with common sense, good conscience, natural justice, equity and fair play. Knowing you to be of high principle, I am sure you will not settle for any less humane consideration.
It is true that the matter outdated your admini-stration. But as the head of the organisation, you inherited all its assets and liab-ilities. This matter is one of the liabilities and the buck stops at your table. As part of his act-ivities to mark the close of the last millennium, the Pope made a historic apology on behalf of the Catholic church for the sins of the past leaders against many races, partic-ularly, for undermining the cherished traditional heritage of Africa. And President Obansanjo, in his third Democracy anniversary mes-sage, apologized to all Nigerians, particularly the victims of human rights violations, on behalf of the past leaders. By these precedents, history invokes on Charlie Soludo, the imperative to play the statesmanly Pope and President Obasanjo, on behalf of the past CBN leadership while he redresses the issue.
Finally, let me in the manner of Aristotle remind the CBN that all virtue is summed up in dealing justly with every man, and that the defence of immorality and injustice robs one of respect and good image. While I bless the struggle the CBN ex-workers the immortal verse of St Paul of the Bible, that says “everything that was written in the scripture was meant to teach about perseverance and hope and how people who did not give up were helped by God (Romans 15:4-5), and Frederick Douglas, asserted that “the whole history of progress of human liberty shows that it has been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it will never….” The good Lord will not allow their struggle to be in vain.
Orisewezie writes from Abuja.
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