CBN Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (left); Maryam Waisu Yaro (right)
Twenty minutes to midnight on February 25, 2013, and a day before the board of the Central Bank of Nigeria was due to meet, Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi developed a craving for romance—he badly needed a kiss.
The
governor, married, with children, grabbed his mobile phone and typed
out a message. “Maybe you should come kiss me before board meeting
tomorrow,” Mr. Sanusi wrote and then squeezed the send button.
At
about 9 a.m. the next day, Mrs. Maryam Yaro, a married mother of two, an
assistant director and subordinate to the governor at the CBN, arrived
Sanusi’s unnamed Abuja hotel, seeking to keep the date and help address
her boss’ craving for a kiss. (Insiders say board members, including
those who live in Abuja, are usually lodged in hotels ahead of board
meetings).
But by the time Mrs. Yaro left the hotel to return to
her official desk at the CBN, the duo had also struck out an arrangement
to spend the rest of the week together in Lagos.
So, in
the evening of Wednesday February 27, Mrs. Yaro flew to Lagos ahead of
Mr. Sanusi and checked into a hotel in the city, skipping work, at
taxpayers’ expense, on Thursday February 28 and Friday, March 1.
To
keep faith with Mrs. Yaro’s date, the CBN governor arrived Lagos,
travelling on a chartered flight, on the night of February 28, and
checked into the Federal Palace Hotel, passage and boarding all at
taxpayers’ expense.
Both Mr. Sanusi and Mrs. Yaro rendezvoused in the hotel till Sunday when both of them returned to Abuja,
PREMIUM TIMES learnt.
“…I
had such a wonderful weekend,” Mrs. Yaro confessed to the governor
while aboard her Abuja-bound flight. “You have revived in me what I
thought I lost long ago. I thought I lost the passion to love again,”
she claimed.
“Alhamdulillahi. Love you,” Mr. Sanusi responded in a measured tone.
Insiders say repeated violation of the statutory
code of conduct for public office holders
such as hiring his girlfriends and mistresses without complying with
public service rules, dating married and unmarried women within the
bank, and flirting with them during official work hours have become
defining characters of Mr. Sanusi’s governorship of the central bank.
An
official of the bank spoke of how Mr. Sanusi had enthroned nepotism at
the bank, arbitrarily hiring girlfriends and relatives and engaging in
extramarital relationships with staff.
“This man (the CBN
governor) is the most morally bankrupt governor the CBN has ever had,”
the official, who did not want to be named for fear of retribution, told
PREMIUM TIMES. “Forget all the pretences, he is a shameless man of
loose character.”
Investigations by this newspaper revealed that Mr. Lamido hired his latest mistress, Mrs. Yaro, without complying with the
CBN recruitment policy that stressed, “all appointments shall be made on the basis of merit, through a fair and open selection process.”
“The
principles underlying the recruitment process are those of fairness,
credibility, equal employment opportunities, merit and optimization of
career prospects for currently employed staff,” the bank said on its
website.
But Mrs. Yaro, insiders say, was hired in July 2012
without adherence to these principles. Those who should know say Mrs.
Yaro, who was a staff at the National Programme on Food Security, an
agency under the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, was brought into the
bank as assistant director without “advert for the vacancy and after a
kangaroo interview.”
When contacted, Mr. Sanusi said due process was followed in hiring Mrs. Yaro.
He
said having worked for years in the ministry of agric, Mrs. Yaro came
highly recommended and qualified for the job for which she was hired.
The
CBN governor continued, “I have known Dr. Yaro since 1981. She was my
student in Yola and she later came to ABU Zaria. We have been very good
friends but this is not why NIRSAL took her. You may wish to check her
CV against all the other CVs in NIRSAL. And she did go through an
interview process with the NIRSAL CEO making the decision not CBN HR.
“As
for the personal allegations, this is all strange to me but I have a
personal policy of not responding to such allegations since in Nigeria
anything can be published on any public officer without proof. I have
limited myself to what concerns official allegations and leave you to
your God and your conscience on whatever else you want to publish. Thank
you for telling me though.”
Mrs. Yaro however declined comments when contacted by PREMIUM TIMES.
“Be
careful what you are saying,” she told one of our reporters on the
telephone. “I have nothing to comment to you on anything.”
When
asked if she would be willing to respond to specific questions about her
trips to Lagos to keep dates with Mr. Sanusi, she simply said,
“Whatever it is, I don’t know. Will you just let me be?”
But our
investigations revealed that the governor’s claim was far from accurate.
Through several interviews and review of records, PREMIUM TIMES was
able to determine that Mrs. Yaro and Mr. Sanusi had dated each other for
at least six months before she was hired.
Insiders say Mr. Sanusi
repeatedly pestered the human resource department of the bank ordering
it to bring Mrs. Yaro’s application to him for approval. And once the
file reached his table, the governor wasted no time in treating it.
On
June 25, 2012, Mr. Sanusi, who was travelling in South Africa at the
time, telephoned Mrs. Yaro to break the news to her that he had approved
her recruitment in what critics consider a clear conflict of interest
and a violation of a provision of Nigeria’s Code of Conduct which
stipulates that “a public officer shall not put himself in a position
where his interest conflicts with his duties and responsibilities.”
Mrs.
Yaro, (whose businessman husband, Ahmed, is largely based in Kaduna but
visits Abuja regularly) assumed duties at the CBN in the first week of
September 2012 and was deployed to the Development Finance Department.
The
department then put her in charge of the bank’s Nigerian
Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System For Agricultural Lending, (NIRSAL), a
unit that attempts to fix the agricultural value chain, so that banks
can lend with confidence to the sector and, encourages banks to lend to
the agricultural value chain by offering them strong incentives and
technical assistance.
Sources said Mrs. Yaro married Ahmed (or
Shuaib, according to another source) six years ago after her first
husband, Waisu Yaro Bodinga (then an executive director at the Nigeria
Ports Authority) died in the ill-fated ADC plane crash of 2006.
The
romance between Mrs. Yaro and Mr. Sanusi became even hotter after she
began work at the bank, with the two lovers regularly exchanging
telephone calls and text messages during work hours to profess love for
each other.
At times, Mrs. Yaro would remain in her office far
beyond close of work to enable her to keep appointments with the CBN
governor, records show.
Sometimes, Mrs. Yaro would raise concerns
about Mr. Sanusi’s other girlfriends and mistresses (such as Sutura and
Rose) and how they were blocking her from getting the governor’s full
attention, but the relationship continued nonetheless.
Mrs. Yaro
also began to have access to confidential information known only to top
management and board of the bank, insiders say.
At a point, one
source said, she began to strategise to corner contracts for one Goke
Akinboro, the Chief Executive Officer of Lagos-based Cellullant Limited,
an information technology company. Mr. Akinboro is also described as
“very close” to Mrs. Yaro.
On March 15, 2013, the CBN lovers
headed to Lagos again for another weekend of fun. The initial plan was
for the duo to fly to the nation’s commercial capital on Saturday, March
16, returning to Abuja on Sunday. But the trip had to be brought
forward by a day after the lovers realized that the Area Council
election in Abuja was holding that Saturday and that movement might be
restricted.
Mrs. Yaro arrived Lagos on the night of March 15, and immediately checked into the
Radisson Blu Anchorage Hotel
on Victoria Island. Mr. Sanusi flew from Kano to Lagos via chartered
jet on the bills of the Nigerian taxpayers. He arrived at about 11 p.m.,
stopped by his Ikoyi home, before dashing to the hotel where Mrs. Yaro
was waiting in a seductive dress in Room 23. The lovers spent that night
and the next day together in the hotel.
As he flew into Abuja
March 17 on a chartered jet, Mr. Sanusi sent a message to Mrs. Yaro
saying, “Love. Just landed in Abuja. Thank you for a wonderful weekend.”
Mrs. Yaro replied, “Alhamdulillah. I had a wonderful weekend too. I am
able to get the 3:15 flight on Arik Air. Love you.”
But in-between
those rendezvous in Lagos, Mr. Sanusi and Mrs Yaro also found time to
get together elsewhere. They were to meet on March 11, 2013, in Makurdi
but somehow Mrs. Yaro could not make it to the Benue State capital.
But earlier on February 14, (Valentine’s Day), the lovers had a good
time together in Maiduguri. Although, the two of them travelled to the
city on different missions, they somehow found a way to get together.
At
a point, Mrs. Yaro voiced open frustration when Mr. Lamido delayed in
taking her calls as she tried, frantically, to track him down. “I’m
thinking that one Shuwa girl has snatched you away from me,” Mrs. Yaro
wrote in a message. “I don’t trust them (Maiduguri girls) with you.”
A
velvet-ranking figure within Nigeria’s economic and political circles,
Mr. Sanusi, is generally perceived as one of the intellectual anchors
and moral conscience of this administration. When his five-year term
expires next year, he has indicated he would not renew his contract. Mr.
Sanusi has a well-advertised ambition to become the future emir of his
native Kano, where he is already a top chieftaincy holder (Dan Maje
Kano). Dan Majen Kano, a historic title, which means Son of Emir-Maje,
is reserved for the royal family members from the Kano Habe dynasty.
A zigzag prospect to run for the Nigerian presidency is also believed to be floating in the horizon for Mr. Sanusi.
Multiple sources at both the CBN and
First Bank,
where Mr. Sanusi was managing director before his appointment to the
central bank, describe the governor as an “incurable womanizer.”
“This
guy seems unable to resist anything in skirt, and it is unfortunate
that a lot of young people look up to him as an example,” one of Mr.
Sanusi’s aides in Abuja said, expressing widely held concerns in banking
circles that “It is sad that he wouldn’t even let married women be.”
Mr.
Sanusi, 51, appointed CBN Governor on June 3 2009, is a smart economist
and award-winning banker with a background in risk management.
He
holds a graduate degree in economics from the Ahmadu Bello University,
Zaria and a diploma in Sharia and Islamic Studies from the African
International University in
Khartoum,
Sudan. Today, Mr. Sanusi is also commonly regarded as an important voice in Islamic jurisprudence.
The Banker,
the UK-based financial magazine honoured him in 2010 as global Central
Bank Governor of the Year as well as African Central Bank Governor of
the Year. In 2011, the TIME magazine listed Mr. Sanusi in its annual
publication of 100 most influential people.
At the African Banker
Awards gala dinner held Wednesday in Morocco, Mr. Sanusi also emerged
the “2013 Africa Central Bank Governor of the Year.”
“There is no
doubt that he is a fairly effective banker,” an official of one of
Nigeria’s leading banks, who requested anonymity for fear his bank
might be targeted, told PREMIUM TIMES. “But he is a man of zero morality
despite his public posturing. It is really sad.”
