By Farooq Kperogi

Nigerian banks may be the only financial institutions in the world where the bank and the government form a tag team against the customer.

They charge you when money enters your account. They charge you when money leaves your account. Then the banks charge you for the privilege of letting the money sit idly where you kept it. Your account is basically a toll gate.

A friend told me just yesterday that he once opened a domiciliary account and deposited $500 in it. Years later he returned to withdraw it. The bank informed him that the entire $500 had been consumed by “account maintenance”!

Maintenance of what exactly? The air surrounding the account?

If a stranger took your money this way, we would call it theft. But when banks do it, we call it banking and then applaud when they announce billions in annual profits.

The saddest part is that Nigerians have made peace with this daylight corporate pickpocketing by banks.