Falalu Bello is a top Nigerian economist, with roots in the “far north”. He was the first managing director of Unity Bank that emerged from the bank consolidation and recapitalization crucible of June 2010. On October 21 2009 he visited Peoples Media Limited, the publisher of Peoples Daily newspaper, where he had an hour long chat with the paper’s senior editors. The talk centred mainly on what he made of the recapitalization policy of the country’s central bank [CBN]. He said the policy reduced the number of banks, which was “a simplistic approach”. To him, “What is needed is a policy to deepen the [financial] market, rather than reducing the number of banks.”
Falalu spoke at length, outlining the strength of Unity Bank, which he described as the “most national bank”, given the composition of its board, and one that had a “national franchise with a northern relevance.” He said the bank had “the lowest exposure to risk areas”, such as oil and gas, foreign exchange trading and stocks. “This is why Unity Bank is the one bank to buy into.” He said consolidation wasn’t designed to hurt the North, but “the implication of it is that it did hurt the North.”
Though Falalu said he had come to sell his bank to Nigerians who wanted to invest in the “the new” banking sector in the Soludo era, he eventually touched on the politics and economy of the North. He said the system here was so brittle that a revolution was inevitable. “There will be a revolution in the North,” he predicted. “It’ll come. What’s happening in the region is a social contagion. It will be there forever if we don’t address it.” It is true that at the time Falalu was speaking, the youth of the North was already seething and an explosion was close to the surface. Firstly, the Boko Haram insurgency had already broken out in the north-east with Borno its epicentre. It would take six years plus to contain it. But before then, the terror group’s attacks had killed hundreds of thousand persons and displaced over two million others. Falalu was speaking during the infancy of the revolt, but his clairvoyance, or sixth sense, was all too obvious. By 2020, while Boko Haram was being “neutralized” in the northeast, the seeds it had scattered were taking roots in the Northwestern states of Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara and Niger. Kaduna, in north central, also was seized by the convulsion of banditry and kidnapping.
This trail of criminality is hardly what Falalu foresaw to be a “revolution”. Roughly defined, it is a radical change in an existing socio-political and economic order. Mao Tse-Tung, the legendary Chinese leader, said, “Revolution is not a dinner party, ….; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly and modestly.” Jose Ortega Y. Gasset says in “The Revolt of the Masses”, “Revolution is not the uprising against pre-existing order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one.” The late Cuban leader, Fidel Castro [1961], had this to say: “A revolution is not a bed of roses … a revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.”
Simply put, revolution, therefore, is the transposition of an ancien regime with a new one and it comes with shedding of blood. In other words, a revolution must have a purpose, a goal and a means, a trajectory that leaves blood in its wake. Most importantly, it has got to have leadership to channel the raw energy of the disenchanted into an achievable goal. So, yes, Falalu saw a fertile socio-political environment ready for a revolution. The gun powder was ready to be used; what, probably, was not ready at the time was the leadership to make use of the powder to blow away the authoritarian and corrupt order of the day. The intelligentsia, which normally, should take the lead, was too pre-occupied with its attempt to find accommodation within a crumbling order. Nature, they say, abhors vacuum. There was a people ready to be led into battle, but without a leader, some individuals with selfish and often criminal objectives leapt into the charge. This is why today, what we see are criminal gangs in the place of true revolutionaries as Falalu foresaw. As Karl Marx predicted. As President John F. Kennedy spoke of in 1962. Or Albert Camus wrote about in “The Rebel”. So Falalu wasn’t wrong in his prophecy. It came about but not in the form he foresaw.
