As Senate battles ailing capital market...

Taiwo Adisa, Abuja

Musa Al-FakiTwo major developments caught the attention of all senators last week. First was the denial by the Chairman, Senate Committee on the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Senator Abubakar Sodangi, over media reports that the interim report of his committee’s probe into activities of the FCT administration between 1999 and 2007 did not emanate from him. Media reports last week had given details of the interim report of the committee which was due to be submitted to the Senate. But Sodangi, last Tuesday, took to the Senate floor to disown the publications, saying what his committee had was a working document which was circulated to its members.

Whether working or conclusive, the document which has been published by the media made categorical deductions from the public hearings conducted by the committee on the FCT alongside the one on Housing and Urban Development, headed by Senator Ikechukwu Obiora. Senator Sodangi, who took the floor by citing Order 43 (personal explanation) of the Senate Standing Orders 2007, as amended, said the report had leaked. The president of the Senate, Senator David Mark, was to come in strongly when he asked the committee to probe the source of the leakage as it finetuned its report.

But that development has only added to the heat that has been generated through the FCT probe, which has largely become a probe of the immediate past minister of the territory, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai. It is expected that the committee would avoid further troubles as it gets prepared to present the ‘full’ report of the probe. But while the heat on the FCT probe was turning off, the Senate, on Wednesday, regained its focus and took a decisive step that could save the N1.9 trillion investments in the nation’s stock market. Chairman, Senate Committee on Capital Market, Senator Ganiyu Solomon, was the catalyst of an action all senators saw as coming in the right direction.

Senator Solomon had presented a bill aimed at regulating activities at the market in a week that the market witnessed some free falls. His presentation was faultless as he took his colleagues through the details of the bill aimed at regulating the stock market and sanitising the Nigerian stock Exchange (NSE). According to him, the bill, titled “A Bill For An Act To Establish Chartered Institute of Capital Market Registrars to Regulate and Control The Practice of Share Registration And For Matters Concerned Therewith, 2008,” was aimed at protecting the more than N1.921 trillion investments in the market. The bill was backed by Solomon and nine other senators originally, but the entire Senate floor listened with rapt attention as Senator Solomon read the lead debate. Many of the lawmakers are also investors in the market and are also worried as many Nigerians are about the news emanating from the market in recent times.

Senator Solomon stated that statistics from the market indicated that the capital market had 209 quoted companies with 312 securities listed on the NSE. He also observed that the events in the post-consolidation banking and insurance sectors had impacted seriously on the stock market, leading to fresh demands. He also mentioned government efforts at privatisation as one of the sources of the upward swing in the activities of the market. He said the demands occasioned by these factors had called for structural and institutional capacity modification. Vice Chairman, Senate Committee on Inter-Parliamentary Affairs, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, said there was the need to study the capital market sector very appropriately so as to save the investments worth billions of naira.

He said Senator Solomon’s bill was not only timely but also capable of redeeming the fears that the sector was heading for total collapse. “We need to know more about the happenings in the capital market so that we would be able to protect the investment of Nigerians,” he said. Another Senator who took the floor to commend the bill was Senator Sodangi, who declared that it was a crucial item for the growth of the economy. “This bill is an important one. It is important in the sense that in a developing economy like ours and even in the developed economy such as in the Western world, the capital market is the harbinger of economic growth and I believe we need this bill,” he said. The bill was subsequently passed through the second reading and referred to the Capital Market Committee to report in four weeks. It is expected that when the bill returns for passage, the Senate would have been able to assuage the fears of millions of investors in the stock market.

House and its many troubles

Bola Badmus, Abuja

Dimeji BankoleThe House of Representatives, which has been on recess for the past three weeks, would be resuming today, all things being equal. The House was supposed to have resumed sitting last week but had to postpone resumption till this week. A newspaper had gone to town to say that the scheduled resumption was shifted because some kind of crisis was rocking the House and a little time was needed to resolve the knotty issue within the leadership. The paper cited alleged financial impropriety within the leadership set-up, saying it was something that was capable of threatening the leadership as exemplified by the Speaker, Honourable Dimeji Bankole.

But the House leadership has denied this, saying there was nothing like impropriety of any kind since it had been accountable and transparent in conducting the affairs of the House. Several issues are currently in contention as the House resumes today. Many of them are, indeed, backlogs of what were supposed to have been done but were delayed. For instance, the issue of restructuring of the standing and special committees, numbering 72, has been pending for a while, and about seven months or so into the administration of Bankole, what is essentially known about action taken in that direction is from the grapevine. Beyond the mouthing of a possible "tsunami" that would sweep away the “non-performing” chairmen of some committees, no action has been seen yet.

Also, the Bankole-led House of Representatives, against all expectations, has not named its members on the Joint National Assembly Committee on the Review of the 1999 Constitution, weeks after the Senate had made it public. The whole world and not the Nigerian public alone looks forward to the recommendations of the House Committee on Power and Steel on the investigations it conducted into how the administration of the immediate past president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, spent a huge sum of $16 billion on power generation without any result. The probe of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and its subsidiaries, including the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) are currently receiving the searchlight of a House joint committee. Also, this has become a focus of attention for everybody even far beyond the shores of Nigeria. This is understandable because crude oil is fetching Nigeria over 80 per cent of its revenues.

Former leader of the House, Honourable Abdul Ningi, who served under the immediate past Speaker, Honourable Aminu Masari, will be resuming into the House today to take his seat, having won his election petition case at the Court of Appeal. Already, his return has been generating some heat within the House leadership set-up, with some people speculating a possible dethronement of the incumbent Deputy Speaker, Honourable Bayero Nafada. They are both from the same geo-political zone, which is North East of Nigeria.

The political permutation is such that the combined forces of former speakers of the House; Honourables Salisu Buhari, Ghali Na’Abba and Masari, would rally old and new members behind the candidacy of Ningi to remove Nafada and install the former as deputy speaker. Those espousing this idea are already predicting some kind of trouble for Nafada unless he works extra miles to gain more political mileage ahead of Ningi. Many who had watched Ningi on the floor of the House and outside when he was leader of the House under Masari are convinced that he is certainly not coming back to serve as an ordinary floor member.

The restructuring of the House committees and the naming of members to serve on the joint committee of the National Assembly on the review of the nation’s constitution, giving the delay that has attended it, is suggesting that the leadership itself is aware that it is a time-bomb on its own. But it is also something that cannot wait forever. The latest information about it is that some members of the House of Representatives met in London a few days ago and are trying to raise a number of allegations bothering on finances to draw Bankole’s hand on the committees’ issue, even as they are said to have reminded anybody that cares of the troubles faced by a former speaker of the House, Honourable Patricia Etteh.

The coming weeks would enable the nation to know the direction of the speaker on this issue and some others. It was spokesman of the House, Honourable Ezuiche Ubani, who told journalists last Friday that nobody had been sent to the House by his constituents to become committee chairman. He admonished his colleagues to face and do the precise job for which they had been sent, which he said was lawmaking and improving the lives of the electorate. That statement appears to have indicated that let heavens fall, some committee chairmen would be shown the way out.