How First Bank Ex-MD, Bisi Onasanya Almost Wreck The Bank

 Bisi Stephen Onasanya 

   

Character is like a flame that burns on the hob of accomplishment. Ultimately, it quenches or ignites on the grate of honour. Once you strike the match, you can only use it once. You must kindle its fickle flare to sustain it.

But this requires integrity and native intelligence, in the absence of these, character manifests like disease, goading its affecter towards random acts of dishonour.

Nigeria may be broke. The country may be truly bankrupt. If that is the case, then the country may be flailing right at the edge of the deadly precipice, where prodigal clans careen and plunge down the steep plains of lavishness and sick delight. The facts are mean and the statistics loom grotesquely like tragic integers of an economy in the chokehold of penury and devastation.

Worse hit is the financial sector in the catalogue of ruin that pervades the polity even as you read.

Prime culprits responsible for the depression stealthily stealing upon the country are the self-styled mavericks running the Nigerian financial sector amok. They are none other but the banking industry’s cowboys or rogue entrepreneurs if you like.

These characters comprise executives of top banks in the nation’s financial sectors and they are to blame for the rot and spiraling misfortunes of the sector. While Nigeria depends on them to shrewdly manage and maneuver the economy from a state of uncertainty to a state of prosperity or future affluence, these characters conspired to effect the devastation of the banking industry.

And how did they do that? By granting outrageous loans without collateral and other mandatory securities to themselves, their principals and glorified tin gods among their clients. Rather than re-energise the banking system by imbuing it with the kind of visionary, dynamic and audacious initiatives reminiscent of the best the sector has to offer, these bank executives imposed on the country, a dark pall of financial doom and controversies via their inclinations for and brazen perpetration of cutthroat practices.

Many of them, bank Managing Directors (MDs) or Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) to be precise, sheepishly and maniacally played stooge cum dimwits to plundering boards of directors, chairmen of boards of their institutions and political tin gods While serving as unquestioning muscles to their various principals and clients, these self-seeking MDs/CEOs, deviously sought for themselves large chunks of the loot they pillaged from the coffers of their banking institutions.

It never mattered to them that they were playing with other people’s money, poor, helpless customers to be precise, they simply lusted and groveled for the good life.

There is no gainsaying these incumbent CEOs or MDs sheepishly kowtowed and still kowtow to the excessive demands of their principals and deified clients outside the walls of their banking institutions, what thus become shadow representatives of their will and demands.

Fears abound that with the current level of vulnerability of the nation’s banking and oil sectors, the Nigeria may be in for a devastating and protracted download plunge down the steep ravine of the banking cowboys and oil turks’ ruthless and risky profiteering drive. There are also fears that the impending doom could spell the hoarding of money in the hands of a rich, powerful few.

As a result of the bankers’ banditry, darksome clouds are hovering over the country’s economy thus triggering deficits across the nation’s economic subdivisions and giving rise to panic in several quarters.

The fears are however, hardly far-fetched considering the severe paucity of funds that plagued the nation’s public institutions recently.

Interesting, however, years after he retired as MD of First Bank of Nigeria Ltd, echoes of the gold chain-loving Bisi Onasanya’s reign still reverberate rancorously. While the premier banking institution still wears a facade of glee and grace and sturdiness, sources say it is heaving and caving under a heavy yoke of colossal insider debts.

There is no gainsaying Bisi Onasanya made a lot of money while he served as head honcho of First Bank. He also helped a lot of Nigerian magnates to make a lot of money. For instance, it was during his tenure as MD of First Bank that the bank lent out money to the highest number of people. It was also during his tenure that the bank suffered the highest number of non-performing loans.

According to a report in ThisDay newspaper, during the rounds, “To be fair, whilst Otudeko as chairman cannot completely absolve himself of First Bank’s woes, questionable credit risk management pre-2016, and the insider loans he had taken from the bank which exceeded regulatory limits for shareholders and directors, anyone with a knowledge of the bank knows that much of the blame should be placed mainly on Bisi Onasanya, MD/CEO of First Bank between June 2009 and December 2015.

At the end of Onasanya’s tenure, First Bank had been so badly mismanaged that a former executive director of the bank and later Minister of State for Finance, Remi Babalola, sent a stinker via WhatsApp to the departing chief executive and copied other directors, accusing him of mismanaging First Bank and concealing several infractions under his watch from the board”.

Life is good for Onasanya who currently the Chairman/CEO of a real estate business, Address Homes Limited. He literally lives in a bubble; unfettered access to tons of money, all things bright, bubbly and beautiful; and a growing rock star reputation as a new generation property guru. Many of his peers and protégés would give a limb to swap places with him for just one day.

And for a man that had been likened to Nero, the Roman Emperor who fiddled while Rome burned, Onasanya has been working hard to shake off that perception.

Born in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, Onasanya hails from the Onasanya Family in Ijebu Land, Ogun State. He grew up in Lagos, where he attended St Paul’s Anglican Primary School (Mushin), Eko Boys High School (Mushin), and the then Lagos State College of Science and Technology. Onasanya is the eldest of four children from his mother, and the third of his father’s children.

Source: TheCapital