By Bisi Lawrence

Ms. Arunma Oteh, the Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission, put her pretty little foot into her dainty little mouth the moment she asserted that Herman Hembe, had requested her organization to contribute the sum of N39m towards the public hearing of the investigation of how the Nigerian Capital Market almost collapsed.

Mr. Herman Hembe was the Chairman of the probe instituted by the House of Representatives Committee on the Capital Market and Other Institutions.

The implications are obvious. It was almost like a judge asking an accused appearing before him to fuel his car so he might get to the court in time. Ms. Oteh even drove the point home by demanding, rhetorically, if Hembe did not think that such a demand would undermine his capacity to carry out his duties.

The upshot was a rumpus that saw the resignation of the chairman, a re-constitution of the entire panel, and the resumption of the investigation with a vengeance.

And I mean a vengeance. It was natural to expect that Ms. Oteh had asked for it, and would get it good and hard. That episode had cast a purple colour of expectant retribution on the investigation from then on, with Ms. Oteh striving to be undeterred in helping proceedings in that direction herself.

A touch of arrogance attends her high-flying attainments by her nature, it would seem, and so a ploy to make her state, and over-state, her brilliance need not be contrived beyond merely asking her to favour an audience with her imposing credentials. While the display may excite the urge to applaud from her admirers, it never fails to get her foes’ danders up. It happened at the resumption of the hearing and set the scene for latter undeserved allegations of arrogance.

The following session of the hearing coincided with a meeting of the Economic Management Committee presided over by President Goodluck Jonathan. She sent a note explaining her absence, and further asked, in cultured tones, if she could be excused from further meetings while she would make written depositions to dispose of future enquiries. The presiding chairman took umbrage at the very idea, and was hardly able to contain his disapproval of the request. On the other hand, two other notable players of the Capital Market, Dangote and Otedola, were also absent and merely sent representatives without any explanatory note. Their absence passed without comment.

The most recent session in which the top executives of the SEC ganged up, as it were, against their beleaguered boss has given more than a hint of witch-hunting when viewed from afar. It is for Ms. Oteh to vindicate her stand.

That should not be too difficult, though sensitive documents that are vital for clarifying such situations have a way of disappearing when most needed. But she will also have to address, and squarely at that, the issue of the controversial ‘Project 50’ which is supposed to commemorate half-a-century of Capital Market Regulation in Nigeria. An oft-demanded· answer is to the question of the sponsors. It has been asked, and would appeared to have been dodged, so doggedly that one has become intrigued as to what the answer could be.

The hearing continues next week. Already it might have sprouted a ramification in the shape of some indictments of a criminal nature. It is fair warning that, while a House of Representative Committee conducts a public hearing, the panel itself may be appearing before the bar of public opinion, or that of an even more potent justice.

the stolen mandate? 

President Goodluck Jonathan makes a fool of me most of the time. I am one of those naive characters that take everything a president says at face value. I actually believed him when he vowed he would only present himself for one term as the president.

Those were in the days when it was perhaps difficult to affirm that he even really wished to be president. But no sooner he was sworn in as president than he raised that idea of a single-term presidency of six (or seven) years duration.

That seemed in line with his vow to run for only one term, especially since he added that he would not contest in the proposed dispensation. But that was dispersed in the harmattan wind of last year, after which he began to wade through the waist-high flood of insecurity in the country. That created the perfect atmosphere for double-speak at which the president is fast becoming an adept.

For instance, perhaps only Rueben Abati, whose enigmatic— and sometimes phlegmatic —statements are a fair match to the startling stance of his principle on some crucial matters, could tell whether the president does welcome a dialogue with the Boko Haram at this time. The Vice President, on the other hand, has no inhibitions about that. The president keeps waffling.

Then, with little provocation, he shoots up with the intelligence that he is now on his first term. If he wanted to create a controversy, he got it. His good friends in the Coalition of Northern Leaders are very clear in their minds that he is on his second term already, and has begun to maneuver for a third term. They vow they would lead the rest of Nigeria to stop him.The rest of Nigerians?

But, in any case, why bring up such an incendiary subject in the fragile atmosphere of this insecure period? Is this, won’t you say, not a classic case of heating up the polity? And when the heat has been turned up, the “presidency” then floats down a bland statement of nothing being further from his mind, the very mind from which the argument emanated in the first place. Since the idea has come ashore, there is no turning away from it now any more. It is a veritable moot point into which all men may contribute.

This page can only consider the issue against the backdrop of what is fair to the unity of the country. All members of a party should hold the constitution of the party sacrosanct. It is independent of any other principle or directive as long as it does not impinge on the law of the land with regard to the rights and privileges guaranteed by the individual’s liberty of citizenship. When a group of people then decide, on their own free will, to embrace a particular principle for choosing their leader, their course is in no way liable to a collision with the Constitution, which guarantees that freedom.

The Peoples Democratic Party has (or had?) a rotational system of electing its presidential candidate, based on a clear zonal regime. Cruel death disrupted the system; common sense ought to re-establish it. There is no room for any comparison with what happened to Truman after the death of Roosevelt in the United States of America.

The Democratic Party is NOT the Peoples Democratic Party, nor is the United States the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

The circumstances of our national life must be the backdrop against which we take our decisions. The Northern Elders Forum may not be able to lead all other Nigerians anyway, because this is a stand many Nigerians are capable of taking, and have taken on their own.

The zoning system is already a political sub-culture. It already has my vote though, at the moment, 1915 is the last thing on my mind.

Time out.