Nigerian central bank Governor Lamido Sanusi, who rescued the banking industry from near- collapse four years ago, said he won’t renew his contract when it expires in 2014.
Sanusi, who has led the bank of Africa’s biggest oil producer since June 2009, said it was never his intention to stay longer than one term. He was speaking in an interview with CNBC Africa in Abuja, the capital. Appointed in the midst of a debt crisis, Sanusi, 51, fired the chief executives of eight lenders within four months of taking office after an audit found evidence of mismanagement and reckless lending. He’s pushed for stability in the currency and helped bring inflation down below 10 percent, while at the same time antagonizing lawmakers by criticizing their spending and courting controversy for his outspoken views, most recently on China’s role in Africa.That quality of character, that boldness is a quality that will be difficult to find amongst policy makers in Nigeria,” Bismarck Rewane chief executive officer of Financial Derivatives Co., a Lagos-based business adviser, said by phone today.
Sanusi led the Monetary Policy Committee in increasing the benchmark interest rate by six percentage points to a record 12 percent from September 2010 to October 2011 to bolster the currency and curb inflation. Bond Yields
The government should name his replacement soon to help ease investors’ concerns and manage the transition, said Samir Gadio, an emerging-markets strategist at Standard Bank Group Ltd. In 2009, former President Umaru Yar’Adua didn’t name Sanusi as a replacement to Chukwuma Soludo until two days before his term ended.
The naira fell 0.2 percent to 158.95 per dollar by 3:32 p.m. in Lagos, taking its decline this year to 1.8 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Yields on Nigeria’s $500 million of Eurobonds due January 2022 fell 10 basis points, or 0.1 percentage point, to 4.23 percent.
“He has a strong personality and a lot of people invested in the country just because of the personal relationship and the trust in Sanusi, and the confidence that Sanusi inspires,” Gadio said by phone from Lagos, the commercial capital China’s Role
More recently, he criticized China’s role in Africa, saying it’s contributing to “deindustrialization and underdevelopment” in the world’s poorest continent. Africa must shake off its “romantic view of China” and see it as a competitor that’s “capable of the same forms of exploitation as the west,” Sanusi wrote in the London-based Financial Times on March 11.
The Chinese government said it was concerned and dissatisfied with the comments, Xinhua reported on March 14, citing Hua Chunying, spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry.
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