Union Bank: Is Yetunde Oni Not Another Dilettante Behind This Dinosaur?
Union Bank Plc carries the weight of 108 years. That history should confer trust, scale, and the freedom to take long bets. Instead, it has become an alibi. For more than a decade the bank has rotated through investors, CEOs, rebrands and rescue plans, yet it has not rotated out of decline. The reason is simple and uncomfortable: Union Bank has been hiding behind the CBN to stay afloat, while the bank remains a dumping ground for the dilettantes and opportunists that keep it decaying for years. Without the CBN backing, the bank would have been long dead.
The most critical challenge facing Union Bank is not a shortage of capital. Capital has come and gone — from Union Global Partners to Atlas Mara in 2014, to Titan Trust between 2021 and 2023. In January 2024 the CBN dissolved the board again and installed Yetunde Oni as MD/CEO after a presidential panel uncovered opaque proxy acquisitions, hidden multi-billion naira losses, and a $300 million unhedged foreign loan. In March 2026 the courts reversed that dissolution and restored the pre-2024 board led by Farouk Gumel. Fresh capital remains “in process.” Ownership remains in court. And through all of it, the fundamentals have not changed.
The real crisis is intellectual and structural. It is a failure of leadership to think ahead of the market, to manage the balance sheet with discipline, and to build competencies before they become obvious. Money without a strategy is just more fuel for the same fire. That is why investors keep walking away even when recapitalization is on the table.
At the heart of the decay is political capture. The bank has become a feeding trough. Board and executive appointments have reflected patronage more than capability, with government-linked actors treating a 108-year franchise as a reward system. Financials are kept out of public view while allowances, contracts and prestige continue to flow. The CBN provides the implicit backstop, which removes any urgency to reform. The result is an institution that survives not because it is well-managed, but because it is too connected to fail. That dynamic ensures that those with or without banking expertise can feast while the franchise is slowly hollowed out.
This governance failure expresses itself first in the market. Banking leadership means anticipating needs customers have not yet articulated. Union Bank has delivered the opposite: catch-up. Apps, pricing and service levels are benchmarked against GTBank, Zenith, Access and the fintechs, and launched months or years later. There is no visible bet on embedded finance, AI-driven lending for SMEs without collateral, or platform models that turn the bank into infrastructure. Without foresight, the bank cannot shape how the industry evolves. It can only follow. Customers feel this as sameness, and deposits drift to players that feel alive.
Inside the bank, the same logic plays out. For years the internal story has been restructuring, downsizing, reengineering and rebranding — all reactive, all after results deteriorated. That is organization transformation without industry transformation. It makes the bank thinner, not smarter. The message to staff is implicit: become efficient and lose your job. The best talent leaves for institutions building capabilities ahead of demand. Strategy remains trapped at the top because managers at all levels are treated as clerks, not architects.
Shareholders have paid the heaviest price because capital funds futures, not restructurings. Union Bank’s playbook across regimes has been consistent: shrink the denominator. Sell assets. Close branches. Cut headcount. Improve ROI on paper. That may stabilize in the short run, but it does not create growth. Growing revenue requires foresight and investment before the market is obvious. There is no strategic architecture for 2030, no narrative of what disproportionate competencies the bank will own. With ownership still disputed, investors read the stock as a turnaround trade, not a growth asset.
Regulators see the same problem from the balance sheet. A bank’s core job is maturity transformation — turning short-term deposits into long-term productive assets while preserving liquidity, solvency and regulatory ratios. That only works with foresight to price risk and build buffers. Union Bank has failed this test. Instead of a stable retail deposit base, it has relied on volatile corporate funds and expensive short-term borrowing to fund long-dated, poorly hedged exposures. The $300 million unhedged loan that blew up when the naira floated is the clearest example. Funding costs rose above asset yields, credit quality eroded, and management responded with more denominator management. That is not a capital problem. It is an Asset and Liability Management failure, and ALM is a leadership problem.
The broader economy loses as well. Banks should be engines of transformation, financing demographics, technology and trade early. Union Bank is a rule-taker in a market being redrawn in real time. There is no coalition-building with telcos and merchants, no attempt to set standards, no public view of how AI, embedded finance and platform banking will change Nigeria. The bank is fighting Stage-C battles — price, distribution, incremental service — in a game whose rules were written by others.
Why does this persist? Because leadership has confused activity with strategy. The urgent — NPLs, cost-to-income, regulatory ratios — has crowded out the important: foresight. There has been no cultural admission that branch-and-loan era knowledge may now be irrelevant. Periods of past stability reinforced “more of the same.” As long as the CBN backstop exists, the bank survives without having to win. And that is precisely why it does not.
The Yetunde Oni moment was supposed to be a break to unlearn before rebuilding. What the market has seen is continuity: efficiency drives, portfolio clean-up, digital catch-up. Necessary, but not sufficient. What is missing is the hard work of competing for the future — building knowledge before revenue, setting stretch goals, and shaping industry structure instead of operating within it.
This is why serious capital stays away. Investors read intent. They ask: does management have headlights that shine farther than competitors? Is the budget about building new capabilities or just cutting costs? Is the firm a rule-maker or a rule-taker? At Union Bank the answers point to the latter. Champions allocate attention to regenerating strategy. Laggards focus on protecting the status quo.
Union Bank does not have only a cost problem. It has a future problem. Maturity transformation without foresight is gambling. A 108-year brand without ambition is a museum. Until leadership stops managing decline and starts inventing what comes next — by treating ALM as a strategic weapon, replacing annual planning with architecture, and measuring progress in learning rather than cuts — the bank will remain a laggard.
Waking a laggard is not for dilettantes. It is for leaders willing to rewrite rules, build rather than cut, and stake out the future first. Until Union Bank does that, fresh capital will keep coming in and leaking out, while market share, talent and relevance continue to erode. And the system will keep being asked to carry a bank that has not learned the most basic lesson of banking: that survival depends not on how much money you can raise to hide your mistakes, but on how well you manage the mismatches that define the business.
