BY WILLIAM JIMOH

Mich Shote

Who said the capital market cannot be used to generate funds that will help in building infrastructures in all the other sectors of the Nigerian economy?  If the operations in the market are properly monitored and the brokers live beyond their fraudulent acts that have sent many shareholders to their early graves, the market can take its rightful position in the economy.

If you look at the pension funds for instance, that alone can be used to develop the housing sector because if you know the amount that is been placed in these banks, you will see that the fund can take care of the housing problem that most Nigerians now face.

To achieve this, Nigerians also need to be enlightened because following the market meltdown; most Nigerians have been destroyed in terms of their investment. The problem of market crash then killed a lot of people and rendered a lot irrelevance to the present operation because of the lose they suffered.

There was a friend of my, who had close to N12 million worth of shares and the thing was reduced to less than N2 million. After struggling for about two to three years to survive the reality he did not prepare for, he died in 2010.

And for me, I am a little lucky because we are almost holding shares of the same volume until a time I decided to invest in property, which was what saved me from experiencing almost the same volume of lost. This has made me lost interest on the whole thing. I have directed my core investment into other sectors of the economy and that is what I think other Nigerians have also done.

For this reason, the regulators must begin to do more enlightenment and ensure that this growth currently being witnessed in the market is sustained  to encourage such people and make them see reasons why they need to be back in the market while the new investors are also been attracted.

William Adebayo
We don’t believe the capital market has grown enough to infrastructure needs of the country.  The question you may need to ask is where will the money come from; large part of the money we have today belong to the foreign investors and if they withdraw their money today, what are we going to be left with. One thing we need to understand is that most of the money they brought into our market is loans from their country.

Though the percentage on these loans may be so marginal, they still remain loans and they may need to send them back home at any time that may be less expected.  So, I don’t believe what they are saying that the market can raise money for infrastructure development.

I look forward to a situation where most of the directors in SEC will be encouraged to buy shares. Most of their directors are not involved directly in buying and selling of equities; they don’t invest in the market. Many of them only love to talk, they do not believe in what they say because they fail to put their money there.

Most of the companies that are doing well in the market today like I told you are companies that have parent companies in Europe, which serve as their bedrock and for a company like Nestle which is one of the stocks you can look up to in the market today, Nigerians own nothing more than 31 percent and daily sales shows that as individuals are selling, corporate bodies are buying. So, we don’t believe we are there yet.

If you look for instance at most of the foreign companies that are doing well today aside the fact that they have overseas parent companies, they also have the fundamentals that have worked for them over the past 100 years. That type of fundamental cannot easily crumble which is the more reason it is still working for them today and that is the spirit it requires to be able to stand out as an operator in the market.