CBN must do much more against these COT robberies!
After shouting for a long time about ‘inverted bank robberies’ (the type that do not involve gun-wielding marauders storming a bank and sticking up the cashier and making away with large sums of money), it appears the Central Bank is waking up to deal with banks clandestinely robbing their own customers. It has ordered banks to return excess COT taken from their many unsuspecting customers and also banned maintenance charges.
But I think an active CBN ought to do some restitution work on this matter. Account maintenance charge is a crime and the CBN must historically deal with this issue. Banks illegally introduced this and it has operated for three to four years. Restitution means that banks must be made to refund these monies stolen from customers for more than three years now. We always have lily-livered government and its agencies who only like to protect their own and ignore customers. Overseas, banks like Barclays, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, and many others are given hefty fines for messing about with rules or ‘stealing’ customers’ money. COT, maintenance charges are stealing and they should be punished with hefty sanctions: ask the banks to provision for the huge monies they have been taking from our accounts – me and many other customers! It is that simple.
Indulgees would recall how I have often made some noise about the nonsense called COT charges. At some point I suggested that it reminded me of that very unfortunate incident known as cot death. As a matter of fact, COT application in Nigerian banking is robbery by strangulation! This point becomes stronger if you consider that it is irresponsibly applied across different customer segments, including those whom a COT charge could bring their balances into negative! Well, maybe not exactly so, but I trust if you really looked hard enough you would find a victim that falls into that negative-balance grouping resulting from punitive COT charges!
I have often wondered (not much different from the Wonder Wonder Wonderer that Femi Kuti sang about) and then asked why banks would not try to move an inch for customers when it comes to these so-called costs. It really doesn’t add up for me. I can understand certain penalties for certain behaviour by an account holder which makes a bank unable to use that customer’s deposits for the purpose of ‘creating money’ (for instance, a penalty for withdrawing more than X times in a month), but I cannot understand why having money put in my account by way of cheque should cost me a dime!
As with everything, we all live with it. We wallow in it and just continuously turn the other cheek to get more gboosas from our banks. We, Nigerians, think the only thing to protest about is government and labour-related matters. We don’t seem to be alive to our responsibility of picketing banks and the CBN over their ‘matter over mind’ (read that for profit over customer) attitudes. They have gone on for years with this hideous COT and even when some banks have advertised certain savings products and promised that is would be COT-free, they suck you in for a while and then slam it gboosa on you just almost when it seems like you aren’t looking. And some people wonder why we are high on the corruption index! They would think it is only the massive stealing of money by government officials that make up the parameters for measuring how corrupt our country is. But we know there are less transparent behaviours, including cheating customers whom you are supposed to make happy.
You have your money in your account. At the end of the month an email statement is sent to you. Your eyes run down the items on the statement. You are checking to see what’s gone out and what’s gone in. You want to be sure neither you nor your bank has cheated each other. Your payments out, drawn on your cheques or the transfers you made, all seem okay. The payments into your account, either by way of cheques or cash deposits, all seem okay too.
But then your eyes are not satisfied yet. They are looking for trouble spots. They think there must be trouble spots. This statement was prepared by Nigerian bankers in a Nigerian bank, so there must be at least a trouble spot and your eyes need to find it. Your eyes will like to tell your brain and, indeed, your mind that everything is alright.
And so, once again your eyes comb through the fine details of the statement. As it is sent via an email message, you decide to print it out, increasing the point size of the text so you can see it even more clearly. Yes, that’s what a bank statement from a Nigerian bank does to you. It makes you begin to act as if you are on some octane. This happens to those who really know how they got their money, especially if you are not a politician, not a government contractor, not a civil servant with the power to approve things, especially all sorts of things! Those are people who might not bother to look at the details of their bank statements. They would be contented with just looking at what analysts like to call “headline figures”. And it is always the case that once they are satisfied with what they see in the headline figures, they feel good and don’t bother what might have been creamed off their accounts in the name of anything you would like to call it! After all, if you have stolen or earned something through fiddling, you probably wouldn’t bother much except the headline numbers don’t make you happy. Aha! You know yourselves!
At this point your eyes are beginning to be heavy. But that’s no deterrence to this mission. Then suddenly, your eyes’ tenacity pays off. You can see it clearly. You had glossed over it with a smile when you first saw it. They called it capitalised interest. It’s in CREDIT to you, so you are happy that your bank had given you something. But on the DEBIT side is something they named MAINTENANCE charge. This is serious, you tell yourself. It had to be. It’s what a Yoruba man will see and scream OTI O! An Igbo man would scream MBA NU! A Hausa man – DAN BURU BA! And here’s why they would scream.
You have just found that your bank credited you with a capitalised interest of N2,461.33 kobo. It then went on to charge you MAINTENANCE fee of N5,000.00. In other words, you are a net loser to your bank for keeping your money. Your bank uses your money to do business, make money. It gives you interest that is lower than the monthly charge it takes from your account. And those at CBN wonder why cashless might still be problematic? They should think again!
PHILLIP ISAKPA