Nigeria pushes for Pan-African Bank supervision

Nigeria's Central Bank will push for coordinated cross- border banking supervision in Africa during the IMF's annual meeting in Turkey next month, its chief said on Tuesday.

Nigerian Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi told BBC radio he would meet with African central bankers at the International Monetary Fund conference to find a way to build a regulatory framework for the continent.

“I am concerned that we have got banks that are spreading across different African counties and while we sign MoUs with other regulators we don't have an African framework for cross-border supervision,” Sanusi said.

“I think the Nigerians, the South Africans, the Ghanaians, the BCEAO (West African central bank), the Central African regulators can together build a framework that makes sure all banks that operate anywhere in Africa are closely regulated,” he added.

Such a framework would make it easier for Africa to deal with regulators such as Britain's Financial Services Authority, the U.S. Federal Reserve and China's central bank, he said.

Nigerian banks have branches spread across Africa and that poses credit and market risks as well as risks to the reputation of the country's banking industry as a whole, Sanusi said.

Nigeria's central bank last month injected 400 billion naira into five banks and sacked their chiefs, saying reckless lending and lax governance allowed them to become so weakly capitalised they posed a systemic risk.

The move by Sanusi, two months after he took office, sent shockwaves through the Nigerian establishment as the regulator listed some of the country's biggest corporate names as bad debtors and pledged to recover the funds.

Sanusi said some 90 billion naira had so far been recovered.

Nigeria's anti-corruption police have pressed criminal charges against four of the five bank chief executives, while the fifth is outside the country and has been declared wanted.