Suspended Nigeria Central Bank Boss Hits Back

Nigeria's suspended central bank governor has implied that he will challenge President Goodluck Jonathan's decision to suspend him on grounds of financial recklessness.

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, an internationally-respected banker, told a Nigerian TV station on Thursday that the law does not allow the president to remove the governor without the consent of the senate.
"The central bank is an independent institution, [and] there is a section of the act that says the president cannot remove the governor without two-thirds of the senate," Sanusi told Channels Television in Lagos, the commercial capital.

"There was a reason for that section. You cannot go round that section by saying, 'I'm not removing you, I'm suspending you,'" Sanusi added, according to a report from Reuters news agency.

"You cannot do that because it undermines the entire principle, and if the idea is under the interpretation act, or if the president appoints so he can suspend, the president doesn't appoint - he proposes and the senate confirms, so the governor is actually appointed by both the president and the senate and therefore should be removed by both."

Sanusi said the decision should be challenged "so that governors coming after me will not refuse to act, or will not refuse to be independent for fear that they will be suspended".
The governor, whose first term was due to expire in June, had reported that $50bn worth of oil sold by the state-owned Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) had not been paid to the government, sparking unease among the ruling elite who are often criticised for not being tough on corruption.

He later lowered the estimate to $20 billion.
The Senate Committee on Finance last week ordered an independent forensic audit into the missing money.
In the TV interview, Sanusi said there was no reasonable grounds for the president to make allegations of financial recklessness against him.
He said although the central bank's accounts for 2013 were audited those of the NNPC had not been audited since 2005.
"We already audited for 2013 and an institution that has not been audited for, God knows, eight years," Sanusi said. "You know nobody talks about financial recklessness."

Plaudits for Sanusi
The governor's suspicion of massive fraud at the heart of one of the world's most opaque national oil companies has put pressure on Jonathan a year ahead of elections, when he is already reeling from a failure to quell an increasingly violent Islamist insurgency in the north.
The NNPC has repeatedly denied Sanusi's allegations.
Sanusi was named as the Central Bank Governor of 2010 for both the African continent and the entire world, by the prestigious Banker magazine.
The editor of the magazine said then that few candidate names generate an overall consensus on judging panels but that Sanusi had been chosen unanimously as the best global central bank governor of the year.

Appointed in the midst of a debt crisis in 2009, Sanusi is also credited with reforming Nigeria’s banking sector by taking controversial decisions, including firing the chief executives of eight leading banks over huge non-performing loans.