However while the arguments by the CBN may be convincing in some respects, they fall short of addressing some other more compelling considerations that bother majority of Nigerians in this matter. For, taking up the initiative in proper context, it throws up the challenge of juxtaposing national interest with the convenience of the CBN staff who of course deserve to be availed the most appropriate conditions for doing their jobs. This is not to raise the issue of regionalisation of the institution.
Seen from an operations perspective, the need exists to consider the impact on the country in moving these very defining departments of the institution from Abuja to Lagos, just to pander to trumped up considerations of tendentious nature. The question that springs up here is, without these departments at the CBN Abuja headquarters, what else will make the institution relevant and remain in Abuja?
Meanwhile, beyond the functional incongruity of the envisaged relocation, there are other factors that make the move suspect and trouble prone. For instance, on a more disturbing note, the ‘return to Lagos’ agenda also suffers in some context from the unfortunate coloration of ethnic bias in favour of the South West geographical zone, given that all the authorities that are in position to initiate and drive the agenda are from the South West. Nigerians who belong to this school of thought cite the facts that President Bola Tinubu, Chief of Staff to the President Femi Gbajabiamila, Minister of Finance Yomi Edu and CBN Governor Oluyemi Cardoso are all from that region. Hence the opponents of the initiative who include the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), have a genuine concern that needs to be considered in the national interest, given the spectre of tacit regionalization of the CBN.
Also, from a historical perspective the initiative breaches the primary objective of relocating the nation’s capital from Lagos to Abuja, which was justified on two grounds being the need to decongest Lagos, as well as to provide for centrality of national institutions relatively to all parts of the country. If spatial expansion of the institution to Lagos alone were a credible solution what happens to other parts of the country? Will they also be considered in the relocation exercise?
Of note is that while the CBN has hardly impressed Nigerians with it poor performances in terms of supervising the country’s financial system, its focus should by now be how to get on top of its act, including resolving its internal challenges of corporate incontinence and leadership mal-practices. There is therefore already a consensus that what the institution needs now is hardly a dismemberment which the ‘return to Lagos agenda conjures fears about.
Meanwhile, given the seeming fixation of the CBN leadership on spatial expansion with the ‘return to Lagos’ agenda, comparisons with other wide area operational institutions like the World Bank offer insights into the lack of ingenuity in the gambit by the apex bank. For instance the Word Bank which has projects and offices with complex operations in every part of the world, runs much of its entire administrative and financial services delivery not from its capital in Washington, but from its office at Chenai (formerly Madras) in India. The Chenai operations of the World Bank are so efficient that all parties to the businesses of that institution all over the world get their payment, administrative alerts and any other relevant service as and when necessary. In comparison, if the World Bank which has offices in almost 200 countries and thousands of locations across the world – each with its own dpeculiarites in culture, language, as well as economic and political systems, can be so efficient through deploying relevant ICT capacity, why not the CBN which has a much lesser operational brief to address.
As things stand, the challenge is for the CBN, to think out of the box and do the needful. In citing as a post script, a famous quote from celebrated playwright Ola Rotimi that “the god’s are not to blame’, this is telling CBN Governor Oluyemi Cardoso that his arguments for tacitly relocating the CBN to Lagos from Abuja are not to blame, but paucity of appropriate corporate strategy.