On Islamic banking and the economy
What is the utility of emphasizing that Okonjo–Iweala and Soludo are non-Muslims and insinuating that Sanusi (being a Muslim) is an issue since the subject for regulation is Islamic Finance? Should Sanusi jettison the work of his predecessor? To prove what? The Guardian posits ‘Islamic Finance is for all’. Okay. But should Muslims who have […]
What is the utility of emphasizing that Okonjo–Iweala and Soludo are non-Muslims and insinuating that Sanusi (being a Muslim) is an issue since the subject for regulation is Islamic Finance? Should Sanusi jettison the work of his predecessor? To prove what?
The Guardian posits ‘Islamic Finance is for all’. Okay. But should Muslims who have been clamouring for a system that is conscientious of their belief now take a back seat and hand the driving to others?
When the Guardian seeks to make a rant about ‘timing’ and ‘forum’, one wonders if it would have been acceptable and not provocative for Sanusi to choose a Church Synod to announce the preparation of a frame work for Islamic Financial Services or perhaps he should have gate crashed a Pentecostal Revival to ask for a show of hands and suggestions?
Why the gripe about the platform of a Ramadan lecture to “announce government’s mere commitment to a far-from-ready introduction of Islamic financial services and to seek preliminary advice on how to even proceed”? Should such announcements be made at animist conclaves from which other Nigerians and the press are excluded? What is the bother if any Islamic body or any institution for that matter, makes genuine suggestions of alternatives to a system of banking that benefits only a tiny group of misbegotten economic parvenus who, in cohort with the political class are the problem and burden of the Nigerian people?
It is a wicked, malicious and divisive intent at commentary for Guardian to jest about the statistics of the Islamic Finance sector worldwide by stringing the relative beginning of Islamic Finance (in its modern sense) with the 2007 global value of Islamic banking assets. So they stand at 0.05% of the world total. Meaning what? More vexatious is to suggest that anyone (lest Sanusi at the CBN) is interested in supplanting the conventional banks with Islamic banks. All people (non-Muslims included) want is an alternative system that allows a convergence of their economic needs with their spiritual dispositions. That to my mind is not as mundane as the Guardian editorial board would make us assume.
The Guardian agrees that Islamic Finance has succeeded in other countries, yet predicts failure for it in Nigeria. Even before commencement? Are we working to an answer here? Systems and policies fail in Nigeria partly because of silly, irrational positions as the Guardian is taking – encouraging divisiveness instead of joining hands to make sure the concept is moulded to suit our national economic needs and create prosperity for all our people. After all, Islamic banks are not going to transact in a separate currency neither is it possible or feasible for Muslims to ring-fence themselves within the economy.
What the Guardian will learn with time is that the introduction of Islamic Finance services in Nigeria cannot be about being Muslim alone; hopefully it would be a rein on the crass avarice and criminality of the conventional system as practiced in Nigeria. Many of the errant forbearances at the CBN managed banks would have failed to muster at the credit analysis level of any Islamic bank properly so called. Even more unlikely, no respectable Shar’iah Advisory Board (ah! – that maligned word Shar’iah) could have given imprimatur to such transactions – thus assuring that the strict, evenhanded corporate/credit governance on which Islamic banks are run would have forestalled the erring managements, customers and major shareholders from the incestuous lending norms with which they have dragged the Nigerian banking sector to its now sorry pass.
The Guardian should realize that Muslims in Nigeria are not visa lottery winners. We are as bonafide as other Nigerians and will insist on our rights within the ambit of the norm that continues to make Nigeria be. There is nothing derogating from the secularity of the Nigerian state in asking for and planning the policy framework for the introduction and use of Islamic Finance Services. This not a matter for which Muslims or Islam should be harangued, heckled or for which its proponents should be made to beg for concessions. After all, there are universities in this secular country with curricular and internal regulations which are not only faith based and directed but clearly discriminatory against denominations of the same faith! (And thus are clearly as unconstitutional as Zamfara or Kano states creating religious vigilantes). Would we now scrap the utility of education which these institutions provide our citizens because those schools adhere to one belief system and not another or none at all? I think not. What ought to be done is to engage those institutions and find the middle ground of ‘letting both the eagle and kite perch’. Not to chop down or set fire to the tree!
Olufemi Sunmonu Esq., wrote from Post Office Road, Kano.