I LOVED  it when I read in a recent interview where Hembe, step-aside Chairman of House Committee on Securities  and alumnus of Benue State University called for the Director General, CEO and President of Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission, Ms. Arunma Oteh to show culture for which grads of her esteemed Harvard is known and step aside from office as well.

It is all so nice to say but Hembe must know that Harvard is quite a distance from here. Moreover, the weather here is not so clement and by the time you return from there another culture is sitting pretty in wait for you. Second base, jare.

However, he struck yet another point that gave me endless joy, that he may have began work in this  committee as a greenhorn but now he holds a PhD in the field, no less. That is as it should be, growing on the job. And that makes the two of us. I now hold a PhD in engineering of sorts, starting off with minor drainage and petty boy’s quarters construction a few years ago.  And this is a message and an adage.

Speaking seriously, we have been regaled in the last two or three months with a show that just won’t go away of the diverse wrong-doings, sheer bad management and absolute system failure inside the SEC, plus the unprofitably high flier expenses made out of obviously sinful profiteering being obscenely justified in public glare as private sector expenditure.

We are speaking of stock price manipulation and profiteering. We are speaking of insider-trading, which means that information about stocks is given by the relevant authority to a favoured few and withheld from the investing public. Insider-trading also involves information given by SEC or the NSE affecting stocks, mergers and acquisitions that a professional could turn to a particular advantage. It includes revealed information about the true spread between prices bid and prices asked or the identities of buyers of large blocks of stock and the motives behind such purchases. In this way, prices are artificially raised. In all these, there are abuses.

It is quite fine that we have our own SEC but if we are going to have any improvement in our capital market and therefore, economic transformation as promised by President Jonathan, there just has to be a new profile SEC. Certainly not this one, no matter its pretences, Harvard  alumnus and Professor and all. Did you see how commissioners and directors of the Commission were absolving themselves from DG Arunma Oteh and her practices. These are very bad indications indeed for a national regulatory agency. Just imagine for one plain minute what remains of the Chairman of EFCC should the overall gang of his directors publicly deny him.  Else, we may never know what or who is playing the music Arunma Oteh is dancing. And this is a message and a proverb.

In view of the lightly surveyed issues above, we, who have been hapless victims and losers, do hereby call on the National Assembly to carry out an immediate review of SEC laws and further see to it that they enact corresponding criminal statutes and  ensure enforcement capacity beyond whatever EFCC handlers can presently muster.

Equally, no bank should ever again be allowed, in whatever guise, to operate its own securities underwriting company. Banks must be separated from the idea of raising of capital, distribution of stocks, bonds and such like securities.   They must be tied to confront their traditional task, banking stricto censo. And finally, nka bu uka buru ilu.

Mr.  SAM EKELEDO, a commentator on national issues, wrote from Lagos.