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Nigeria: Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi will not seek second term
Nigeria’s central bank Governor Lamido Sanusi
Nigeria’s central bank Governor Lamido Sanusi, who was named central bank governor of the year by London-based The Banker magazine in 2011 has indicated that will not renew his contract when it expires in 2014.
Sanusi is credited with rescuing Nigeria’s banking industry from collapse four years ago. He has led the central bank of Nigeria – Africa’s biggest oil producer since June 2009.
He was appointed in the midst of a debt crisis, and 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.
The Nigeria naira fell 0.2 percent to 158.95 per dollar by 3:32 p.m. (10:32 a.m. EST) in Lagos, taking its decline this year to 1.8 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Yields on Nigeria’s US$500 million of Eurobonds due January 2022 fell 10 basis points, or 0.1 percentage point, to 4.23 percent.
“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,” said said Samir Gadio, an emerging-markets strategist at Standard Bank Group Ltd.
Sanusi hasn’t shied away from controversy. 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.
More recently, he criticized China’s role in Africa, saying it’s contributing to “deindustrialization and underdevelopment”. Africa 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.
