Nigeria's president today ousted the Central Bank governor who exposed billions of missing petrodollars, a move critics say is a warning to whistleblowers in the run-up to a hotly contested presidential election in Africa's biggest oil producer.
President Goodluck Jonathan accused internationally respected career banker Lamido Sanusi of "financial recklessness and misconduct," and officially suspended him just days before the governor reportedly planned on stepping aside.
The West African nation's naira currency immediately weakened in response.
Last year Sanusi reported that USD 50 billion worth of oil sold by the state's Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. Had not been paid to the government. The Senate Committee on Finance last week ordered an independent forensic audit into the missing money, now said to amount to about USD 20 billion.
The Finance Ministry said missing receipts recovered in an audit accounted for the rest of the missing money.
Jonathan had dismissed Sanusi's charges as "spurious" and has said that corruption is not among the biggest problems suffered in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation of more than 160 million people.
Today, Jonathan named a deputy governor to act in Sanusi's place but also immediately sent to Parliament the name of another banker he proposed as the new custodian of the nation's federal reserves, making clear that he has effectively fired Sanusi.
The reform-minded banker apparently planned a three-month leave of absence starting next month before stepping down when his five-year term expired in June, according to London-based senior analyst Murtala Touray of IHS Country Risk.
"We assess that President Jonathan's suspension of Sanusi is intended on the one hand to send a message to Sanusi's successor not to 'wash government's dirty linen in public,' and on the other to discredit Sanusi's report on the (missing) USD 20 billion," Touray told The Associated Press.
