Nigeria is drawing up plans to defend the country’s banking system amid fears that bad loans racked up during a frenzy of stock market speculation could put some lenders in danger.
Chukwuma Soludo, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, told the Financial Times that the government was looking at creating an asset management company backed by state and private funds that could offer to buy bad debts.
But he dismissed calls from foreign investors for greater disclosure among Nigerian banks to reveal the true scale of their losses on the stock exchange, which has lost 60 per cent of its value in the past year.
“We don’t even need them to start with,” Mr Soludo said. “The foreign investors do not matter in this discussion. What they think does not matter to us. What matters first and foremost is what Nigerian investors think and what they do.”
His comments may surprise fund managers who had come to regard Mr Soludo as one of the champions of a process of economic reform begun under the previous government, which helped to transform Nigeria into a credible frontier ¬market.
The governor, who has repeatedly offered assurances that the banking system is solid, said he would act if any individual bank suffered a shock.
“Any time, any day, a bank could run into trouble, anywhere in the world,” he said. “You have a plan in place to be able to take the bank out of the system and make sure it doesn’t cause a contagion, it doesn’t snowball into a systemic crisis.”
Nigerian officials have increasingly laid the blame for the collapse of the market on foreign investors who withdrew their money at the height of the credit crunch. The director-general of the Nigerian Stock Exchange was quoted by local newspapers last month as referring to such investors as “financial prostitutes”.
Standard Bank says international portfolios withdrew $3.1bn (€2.5bn, £2.2bn) from the Lagos stock market from August to December. But it estimates that international funds never held more than 15-20 per cent of total market capitalisation.
Many in the Lagos financial community argue that Nigerian regulators bear a greater share of responsibility for allowing reckless lending among banks for share purchases that inflated a classic asset bubble. The subsequent rout has fuelled speculation that Mr Soludo will not be reappointed by Umaru Yar’Adua, the president, when his term expires in May.
Mr Soludo argues that even if all the banks’ exposure to the stock market had to be written off then capital adequacy ratios would still remain at a healthy 15 per cent, higher than in many western countries.
But analysts say a lack of transparency among Nigerian banks makes it hard to be sure. Mr Soludo has put their exposure to the stock market at about 900bn naira ($6bn, €4.8bn, £4.3bn). Renaissance Capital estimates the figure to be 1,000bn naira, or 20 per cent of loans.
Stocks in some banks have shed at least 70 per cent of their value since last March. A slowdown caused by falling prices for Nigeria’s oil exports is likely to create additional pressure.
Mar62009