The train wreck that is our banking system was not an act of nature. It was real human beings, overcome with real human greed, and blinded by real human delusions, who have brought us to this sorry pass.

Of course, the guilty party is that class of avaricious “bankers” whose lack of character and basic human decency threatens our entire economy. It is just that the worst of them be ignominiously removed, from the system, as well as pursued by law enforcement agencies so that the guilty can be put where they really belong-- in prison.

But these people were aided and abetted by a whole phalanx of willing collaborators. Yesterday on these pages we spoke about regulatory agencies, chief among them the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose executives became conveniently pliant as criminal elements in the banking system engaged in Ponzi schemes, and then ran off with the family silver.

Already the Central Bank has had to pump N420 billion of our money into the five zombie banks to keep depositors safe. These are Oceanic, Intercontinental, Union, Afribank, and Finbank. A number of other banks are marginally surviving, and Central Bank officials estimate preliminarily that it would cost taxpayers upwards of N1 trillion just to keep them afloat. We know of no country in the world where early estimates don’t end up costing at least twice as much. So we will not be surprised if the final price tag charged to the taxpayer is around N2 trillion.

We are all justly outraged by this blatant theft that has gone to the purchase of private jets for our so-called bankers, some of whom are only a few years removed from the bush.

But where were the auditors?

For the past four years, our biggest audit firms-- Deloitte, KPMG and PriceWaterhouseCoopers-- have nodded and winked as our banks cooked the books and cheated depositors and ordinary shareholders of their hard-earned money. The auditors, being very handsomely paid indeed, were quite happy to play along.

Every year the banks declared ever-larger profits, announcing numbers so outlandish that they created a frenzy on the stock exchange, persuading ordinary citizens to part with their savings and invest in their stocks. At one point, banks alone became so supersized ithat they constituted about 60 percent of the total value of the Lagos stock exchange.

Also collaborating in this heist-- for that really is what it was-- was a whole army of so-called analysts, chief among them the bright sparks at Renaissance Capital, or RenCap, who, as late as a couple of months ago, were loudly insisting that Intercontinental Bank was in fact in rude health, despite all signs to the contrary. To paraphrase the possibly apocryphal American, who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

We now know for certain that Intercontinental, as late as the last quarter of 2008, already was a zombie bank, with a poisonous loan book, whose publicly pious chief executive, Erastus Akingbola, had in fact thoroughly wrecked the institution and only dishonestly claimed that it was the banks’ competitors who were trying to “demarket” it.

We have no reason to believe that any of the auditing firms were engaged in any criminality. Far from it. What is clear, from available evidence, is that at minimum they are guilty of gross dereliction, which will cost us at least N1 trillion.

Remember Enron? That was the American energy company that declared fanciful numbers for so long that Fortune magazine crowned it America’s best company for seven straight years. In the end, Enron was found to be an elaborate scam, with the complicity of its gold-plated auditor, Arthur Andersen. The debacle not only led to the crumbling of Enron but also the collapse of one of the world’s most reputable auditing firms.

We do not wish the same for our Big Three. But aggressive regulators must ask: what did they know, and when did they know it?