Sanusi and perils of a two-party system

But there was a material difference between the way the controversies he generated were perceived before the APC and the way they were perceived after the party’s emergence as a credible threat to the PDP and Jonathan’s barely hidden 2015 ambitions. My position is that without the APC turning the country into a two-party system, […]

But there was a material difference between the way the controversies he generated were perceived before the APC and the way they were perceived after the party’s emergence as a credible threat to the PDP and Jonathan’s barely hidden 2015 ambitions. My position is that without the APC turning the country into a two-party system, the Presidency would perhaps have endured SLS as a garrulous gadfly until his tenure was up.
Since his appointment as the Governor of Central Bank on 9 June 2009, most of Sanusi’s public utterances had been dramatic, colourful, controversial and cantankerous. His actions and off-the cuff remarks and the reactions they generated made him the most controversial Central Bank Governor in the country’s history. He became a darling of some for raising very critical questions just as he achieved notoriety with others for being careless with figures while some held him in contempt for being less successful in providing the right answers to the numerous controversial questions he raised.  
Sanusi’s ‘problem’ in my opinion stems from two sources:  The first is that I feel he is a radical in a job that is decidedly meant for conservative and pro-establishment people.  Radicals by definition relish controversy and a fight. It is their oxygen. When a radical is given a public responsibility there is always the risk that he will turn a rebel and embarrass his benefactors because radicals often find the narrow confines of the system in which they work asphyxiating.  
Sanusi’s other problem is his fascination with the English Language, which he writes with remarkable authority and even speaks better. On the positive side this could make one appear cleverer than one really is. On the flipside, too much  ‘grammar’ could lead to an undue love for the podium and limelight and a fascination with the echo and musicality of one’s words –  with  the attendant risks of gaffes in moments of rhetorical flourishes. As with most system critics or radicals, Sanusi’s approaches to complex issues tend to be simplistic and as the contradictions in his chosen options become obvious, the proffered solutions tend to appear contradictory or hastily taken.
The above has been the case with LSL not just with the contentious amounts he claimed the NNPC failed to remit to the Federation Account (he recanted when he claimed over $49bn was missing before coming up with a fresh allegation of missing $20bn). A clear case in point was his recommendation that the bank executives he sacked for fiddling with depositors’ money who were then standing trial at various courts in the country deserved to die by firing squad. Sanusi later recanted saying that Nigerian bankers were indeed honest, hardworking professionals and not the crooks he had made them to appear.  Again in late November 2012, at the Second Annual Capital Market Committee Retreat in Warri, Delta State, Sanusi lamented the high cost of servicing the nation’s civil service and called on the Federal Government to fire at least 50 per cent of its entire workforce, arguing that it is unsustainable for the country to continue to spend some 70 per cent of its earnings on salaries and entitlements of civil servants. Understandably labour leaders and many others lampooned him, with some even calling for his sack. He had earlier wrongly claimed that the country spent 25 per cent of its revenues on Members of the National Assembly. Again shortly after he was appointed the CBN Governor, SLS announced on October 2, 2009, the removal of Dr Mike Adenuga as a non-executive director of Equatorial Trust Bank. About a month later, he changed his mind and restored the business mogul to the board of the bank, claiming that the CBN had not established any criminal activity against him. Virtually every major move since Sanusi became the helmsman of the apex bank, including the publication of the list of bank debtors shortly after his appointment, have been dogged by self-inflicted controversy, with the SLS often admitting errors.
The point of the above instances is to show that SLS’s allegations that over $49bn were not remitted by NNPC to the Federation Account, his recanting and then coming back with other allegations of missing $20bn, had been his pattern since his appointment as CBN Governor. This raises two crucial questions: Why was the gaffes by SLS tolerated all along? And why was he suddenly seen as constituting himself as an opposition to the government when he has literally remained himself?
What has changed, in my opinion, is that the country has metamorphosed from being a one-party dominant system to a two-party dominant system. This in itself created a simplistic binary of ‘we’ versus ‘they’ in which if you are not for the government, then you are against it and, by extension, for the opposition. In essence while before, Sanusi’s activism was seen as the minor irritations of a gadfly, under the new political configuration, the same activism was perceived as doing the bidding of the other side. The natural tendency of the opposition to come to the side of the ‘enemy of my enemy’ naturally accentuates the suspicion that SLS was doing the bidding of the other side to forestall President Jonathan’s yet to be declared re-election chances. Despite the government’s claims, it remains an open secret that SLS was suspended for ‘embarrassing the government’.
Generally, a two-party system is a dichotomous division of the political spectrum, with one Party usually leaning on the right and the other on the Left: the Nationalist Party vs. the Labour Party in Malta, Liberal vs. Labour in Australia, Republicans vs. Democrats in the United States and the Conservative Party vs. the Labour Party in the United Kingdom.
In Nigeria where the two dominant parties are on the same spot on the political spectrum, and where there is a convergence between the fault lines of region, religion and ethnic, our two-party system will  likely turn the country into a theatre of war without blood, akin to what one witnessed during the Cold War. The tension generated by the suspension of SLS is a foretaste of things to come.  This is because under a two- party system, there is a tendency for the society to be polarized into two halves on the active controversies of the day – without a moderating voice of a third party since the other parties are either too small to be heard or have become appendages of one of the two dominant parties. In this scenario objectivity takes flight and those who strive for the truth will be accused of sitting on the fence.  
In the current bipolar system, there are two perspectives on the Sanusi saga: One, favourable to APC sympathizers is that Sanusi is a whistle blower or even a revolutionary who got suspended for his anti-corruption crusade.  In the same vein supporters of SLS’s suspension accuse him of constituting himself as an opposition to the government or of going on the offensive to curry public sympathy after being indicted by the Financial Reporting Council for corruption.  
Like in the Cold War days, the truth in all these is buried somewhere. What is clear is that SLS, though a clever man, talks too much, often thinks on his feet and did not go about his job with the requisite wisdom. Even if the President does not have the powers to suspend him as some contend – a position I disagree with – wouldn’t common sense have told SLS that it was inappropriate to be seen opposing a government that he was part of (without first resigning), especially on the eve of an election year and when a credible opposition party had emerged? And wouldn’t the same common sense have counselled him that you cannot run an establishment as complex as the CBN without incurring one or two things that your enemies could rope around your neck if the shove comes to push? In my opinion there is a difference between recklessness and courage.  In his latest round of activism that many people believe led to his suspension, SLS simply appeared to be courting martyrdom. But amid all these and like always, SLS managed to raise some important questions – on subsidies on kerosene against presidential directive and without appropriation by the National Assembly and on likely corruption in the NNPC. Beyond these, the rest of the brouhaha surrounding his suspension is mere politics.
It is instructive that SLS left office  pretty much the same way as Willem “Wim” Frederik Duisenberg, first president of the European Central Bank (1998-2003), who like Sanusi was notorious for his bluntness and apparent inability to keep his mouth shut. In a special report on February 8, 2002, captioned, “The Wrong Man for an Impossible Mission”, the Financial Times (London) summed up the angst against the late Dutch economist and financier: “The biggest criticism of Mr Duisenberg is not over the substance of his decisions, but over his presentation. His willingness to talk off the cuff and his often vivid turn of phrase has frequently raised eyebrows among other policy-makers.” No, the Financial Times’ reference was to Willem “Wim” Frederik Duisenberg, not Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.