At the weekend, I joined millions of Nigerians in expressing surprise, awe, amazement, puzzle, incredulity, shock and bewilderment having read the “alarm” raised by former Vice President and African Democratic Congress [ADC] presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar, Waziri Adamawa, that he received a credit alert from an anonymous person or persons that paid money into one of his private accounts. The statement, signed by Atiku’s Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication Phrank Shaibu, said it was raising alarm over “a suspicious credit alert” the Waziri received even though“neither His Excellency nor his campaign solicited, authorised or has any knowledge of the individual or entity behind the unauthorised payment.” The credit alert, Shaibu said, had thenarration “Contribution Electioneering Campaign,” but that the circumstances surrounding the transfer are deeply troubling to Waziri. Why should a credit alert be “deeply” or even mildly troubling to anybody? In Nigeria today, millions of people are standing by their phones every minute, hoping to see credit alerts from employers, customers, parents, children, godfathers, kinsmen, political masters, boyfriends or even from people who made a mistake while in a hurry to input account details. I know a man who hurriedly withdrew money that was paid into his account even though he did not know the source and suspected it was a mistake, but by the time the sender contacted him, he had already spent the money, and said he thought it was from his son. One woman said on social media last year that a credit alert is the best cure for headache and migraine, that it acts faster than Panadol Extra or even Cataflan. Shaibu said this credit alert is “deeply troubling to His Excellency [because] the account is a strictly private one whose details are not in the public domain. This raises a fundamental question: How did unknown persons obtain the confidential banking details of a private citizen? If the private banking information of a former Vice President and a leading presidential candidate can be accessed and deployed for reasons yet unknown, then no Nigerian’s financial privacy is safe. Even more disturbing is the suspicion that such confidential information may have been obtained through persons with privileged access. If established, this would amount to a grave abuse of power capable of exposing the account holder to kidnappers, terrorists, bandits, fraudsters and other criminal elements.” Ranka ya dade Waziri, if you think a credit alert is deeply troubling, what will you say about a debit alert from an equally unknown source? Let me tell you a story about what I went through recently. This year’s Id-el Kabir fell on Wednesday, May 27. Given the spiraling cost of rams, I had been saving money to buy a ram or two, just in case I did not get a free ram from any of my benefactors. When I woke up early morning on May 25, the first thing I did was to check my account balance. Around 10 am, I received a credit alert of my month’s salary, which made me very happy. Ten minutes later, the smile on my face evaporated when I saw a debit alert of one and a half million naira, said to have been withdrawn from a POS. I immediately reached for my wallet, and the bank’s debit card was intact inside it. How could money be withdrawn from a POS when the card was safely with me? Minutes later, another debit alert arrived, this one of half a million naira. I raised alarm; my family members urged me to rush to the bank and block the account. I was about to, but then I relaxed because all the money in the account had been cleared, so there was no need for hurry in blocking the account. I spent the whole of that afternoon, the next day and many more days over the next week at the bank, also “one of Nigeria’s leading commercial banks,” as Shaibu’s statement described their offending bank. The account was blocked; I did Sallah with a blocked account [even though there was nothing to withdraw from it] but the stolen money was never returned. After a week’s “investigation,” the bank told me that there was nothing they could do, that my debit card was used to withdraw the money. My protestation that the card was with me and no one else knew the pin was brushed aside. I was then advised to report the matter to Central Bank’s anti-fraud unit, which I did. CBN found the account into which the money was paid; found that it was fraudulent because it was a student account in Taraba State that was not supposed to receive more than 50,000 at a time but that the [this time, small] bank allowed two million naira to be transferred into it. I heard that CBN ordered the bank to refund my money, but up to now, nine weeks later, I have not received a kobo. That was why I was puzzled by this complaint from Waziri, that he received a credit alert. Me, if I had received a credit alert instead of a debit one, would I hav
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