By Ahmed I. Shekarau, Group Business Editor & Hamisu Muhammad, Business Reporter

As a pointer to this, the World Bank last week sent a team comprising some of its lead financial economists in Africa and consultants to sample views of key stakeholders on the reliability or otherwise of the apex bank’s policy.
The team led by one of its financial economists in the Africa regional office last week Monday met separately with members of both the Senate and House of Repres-entatives committees on banking and currency behind closed doors.
One of the lawmakers confided in Daily Trust last week, that “the World Bank’s fear, according to members of the team who came and inter-acted with us, was informed by two key reasons – the complaints by many banks and financial analysts in the country that the 18 months given by the CBN for the N25 billion recapitalisation was too short a time, as well as the senate’s amendment to the CBN Act which provided for categorisation of banks.”
According to the lawm-akers, “the World Bank team tried to gauge our sincere views with regards to the recapitalisation policy and we told them.” The lawmaker did not tell Daily Trust what the lawmakers’ “sincere” po-sition on the policy was, say-ing that “the team pleaded with us not to make public the opinions we expressed and promised not to make public whatever we told them.”
Our reporter who got contacts of some members of the team sent an e-mail last Tuesday to one of the World Bank’s lead financial econ-omists trying to find out what informed the bank’s pessi-mism about the Central Bank of Nigeria recapitalisation policy.
Till today, however, no response came to our repo-rter’s mail. When contacted on the issue last week Thur-sday, Mr Obadiah Tohomdet of the external commun-ications unit of the World Bank group’s country office in Abuja, said our reporter’s e-mail was forwarded to him for advise, but he has no comments on the matter.
But when contacted for the CBN”s response to the seeming apathy of the World Bank, the deputy director and head of corporate affairs of the apex bank, Mr Tony Ede, said while he doubts if the World Bank will take that position, “it does not run the Nigerian economy and can-not dictate for our country what we should do.”
Mr Ede said “the World Bank has been very supp-ortive of our (recapitali-sation) policy right from day one and we know their position on that. I don’t think they will doubt it.
“But even if it does, it does not run our economy. The good news I have for you is that so far, we have over 15 groups of banks that have agreed to merge apart from several that have met the N25 billion capital base. Besides, I’m sure you’ve read in the news that Union Bank is even planning a N100 billion capitalisation which is good for our economy,” he added.
The CBN spokesman said the whole essence of the recapitalisation, as Soludo harped repeatedly, is to enable Nigerian banks fund productive activity in the real sector of the economy. “How can foreign banks be funding even exploration activities in the petroleum sector? What are our banks doing?” he queried.
Mr Ede said further that, “let me remind you that when Soludo came in as governor (of the CBN) about 11 banks were about to be liquidated. But he said no, let’s allow them to be acquired by other bigger banks so that we can save their customers the trouble of having to be paid only some part of their savings after these banks were liquidated.”