• ’I lost my retirement benefits to market crash’

By Sam Eyoboka
Born on  April 24, 1940, Apostle Hayford Alile  briefly attended  University of Ibadan as a scholar in physics and thereafter proceeded to Howard University, Washington DC, where he earned his B.A. degree in economics and mathematics. He later attended Rutgers Graduate School of Management, New Jersey, USA for his MBA programme before proceeding to the Harvard Business School where he bagged his AMP. 

Alile’s rich working history began as an  economic and financial consultant to Louis Berger Inc, East Orange, New Jersey, USA in 1968. In 1973, he returned to Nigeria to head the Management Consulting Department of the Centre for Management Development, Lagos, and was later appointed in 1976 as the Executive Director/CEO of the then Lagos Stock Exchange (LSE). He later became the Director-General/Chief Executive of  the Nigeria Stock Exchange in 1979. He retired from that position in 1999 and was in the same year appointed to the Board of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN. He subsequently joined the Boards of the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Co. Plc, and the Central Securities & Clearing Systems Limited (CSCS). In this interview, the Spiritual Leader of St Joseph’s Chosen Church of God speaks on why multi-national oil firms won’t invest in the Nigerian Stock Exchange.  Excerpts:

Three years into the economic meltdown, any hope for Nigerian investors in the stock market?
It may take time. Stock market is built on confidence. It just happened as an accident of time; you wanted to put your resources into the stock market and suddenly the meltdown which not peculiar to  Nigeria happened. I will be surprised even if President Barack Obama did not lose money in the American capital market as a result of the meltdown. Nigeria was not an exception, we tried very hard to cautiously link the Nigerian Stock Exchange to global market, but, unfortunately, what happened was at a stage when we were opening our market to the global interactions to attract what they call Hedge Fund Managers, international port folio managers, to bring their money into our market.  I believe in competitive market or market force, but, at the same time, the perfection in our economic environment is not there. You can’t call the Nigerian environment a perfect market.

In a perfect market, foreigners come in with their money and go out at will; but one little thing I learnt in life while working was the British situation. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher started a privatization programme. A lot of companies in Britain were under the control of the British government but she opened up and privatized as much as possible. The process of privatizing the British Petroleum was concluded while she was out of the country. I remember the deal was done giving 15 per cent or so to a Kuwaiti investment organization. When she came back and found out what had transpired, Thatcher said no! She was running one of the most open markets but  she intervened in the interest of Britain. That was the role I too had to play in the interest of Nigeria.

So, I used to sit down with stock brokers of any Hedge Fund Manager coming into the country to invest in the Nigerian market, and ask them: how long will the funds remain in this country? If he says anything less than two years, I tell the broker, ‘Nigeria is in your hand, protect our country, we are not going to allow this money to come here because it will disturb our market’. So, there is no perfect market in the world. What is perfect is your country.
Unfortunately, my colleagues who took over from me made a mistake. They allowed  free entry and free exit. So, when these Hedge Fund Managers brought about over $1 billion into the  Nigerian market, the thing grew within a period of two to three years to over $3 billion, and immediately they heard regulatory authorities speaking in discordant tunes, they immediately sold out. Secondly, they knew that the international market was crumbling; they quickly sold what they had here in Nigeria and exited with over $3 billion which created a huge  hole in our market.

We would not have been negatively affected by the global meltdown had this thing not happened. I put my retirement benefit in the stock market; all the time I spent at the stock market, I banned myself and my staff from buying and selling because of insider information. It was when I left that I invested my little pension in the market and they all perished. You would have imagined that if this man with all the knowledge that he had on the market, how come he lost his money?

Those are the dangers of life. This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened globally. In the 30s, the American economy almost collapsed with the meltdown of the market. It repeated again in 1981-82 or so. So, all of us, a lot of the banks suffered. I could see a lot of the stock brokers, up till today, some of them are still not able to pay salaries. They should forgive us, but if they have to do it again, this is the best time to invest in the stock market. That’s my little advice. The prices are down and they must surely go up again.

The Nigerian situation is unique in a way. For instance, Nestle Foods has  been investing in Nigeria; now, it is moving to Ghana. Many other industries are moving to Ghana because of cost of production and other unfavorable factors. When do you think there will be confidence in the Nigerian  market?
There are two issues we are looking at here. If you take a company like Nestle, it is the most prized company in our market, selling 50 kobo shares listed at the market at over N1,050.00. Somebody must have bought those shares with patience, perhaps  at N5, and today, it is worth  N1,050.00. If they are moving to Ghana, they are going to use the Nigerian resources and expertise to drag up the Ghana market. As a matter of fact, let me tell you that I set up the stock market in Ghana; trained all their staff free of charge in the interest of Africa but that’s a different story.

Nigeria has tremendous resources and we have not started to exploit them. We just discovered oil and we put everything in it. We are now finding out that the gas reserve we have is one of the largest in the world. If you convert the gas energy into liquid energy of petrol, we have more reserve in gas than petrol.
Three years ago, I said that Nigeria is an essentially agricultural country because 70 per cent of the population  live in the rural areas, but we jumped the graph and are now operating and pretending to be a post-industrial society which is not. We have to go back to the realities of our lives—agriculture.

How can a country like ours be importing billions of dollars worth of rice? I was reading a book, Abundance, and it talks about vertical farming. Small countries like UAE that have  no land  have converted top of their buildings and verandas to farms for rice and tomatoes. But there is plenty of land here and we haven’t exploited it. Look at what the new Agriculture Minister is doing today; fantastic! We should be exporting cassava in large quantity.

In 50s or 60s, people came from Malaysia to take our palm nuts. I don’t know if you’ve been to Kualar Lumpur? As you drive from the airport into their main town, you look at  miles of palm plantation. They are not taller than me. They have, over the years, done a lot of research to see that their palm trees don’t grow higher or taller so that from the ground, you just pluck without having to climb. We are now importing palm oil from those places; which is laughable.

If we do the right thing within the next five years, we will be exporting flowers, fruits, vegetables. It is from the surplus of the agricultural products that you now have raw materials for your factories and then call yourself an industrialized country. And with that, we start the type of thing that we are having at Allen Avenue—shops, selling other people’s manufactured goods and our own manufactured goods. But today, the little of the money you save, you want to transform yourself into Allen Avenue, that’s not real.

Our textiles are all imported from China and some of those textiles, in fact, I will say 90 per cent of them are manufactured from hydrocarbons, oil and gas, they are not cottons. When you wear cotton, you will feel 100 per cent of oxygen-fresh air but all these things you are seeing are synthetics. That’s not what God made us for and let’s do things as God wants it. This country is blessed, this thing you are sitting on (referring to a round seat in his living room) is leather from Sokoto and Kano; the best in the world.

Can Nigeria get there?
Why not! In any sector…Chike Obi did not go to university but became one of the best mathematicians in the world. We have Wole Soyinka, a Nobel Prize winner in Literature. Some of the best brains that are making the astronaut machines and other things at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in America are Nigerians. I was in my office at the Stock Exchange House about 25 years ago, a Nigerian came from Chicago and said he just wanted to come and say hello and have a feel of our stock exchange. So, we talked. He was an Efik gentleman. He said he gave his money to one his relations to…by that time, they just opened UBA House, to get him a floor there because he wanted to move out of his office from Chicago to that place. So I asked him, ‘What do you do?’ A computer man  had the largest software company and one of the things he discovered was used by NASA, this Global Positioning System (GPS).

It is now being translated and commercialized and most cars now use it to track their routes (navigator). Who discovered it? A Nigerian and there are many like that. The fastest and most powerful computer was founded by a Nigerian. In all aspects of life, go around the whole world, you see a Nigerian there. All we need is something that will attract them here. The environment that we can put together that will attract them here! Most of them are not looking for satisfaction in the quantity of money they have, it’s satisfaction on how they can impact on you and I positively.

But the challenges of investing in the Nigerian economy are still enormous; you talk of power, you talk of inconsistency in policies, you talk of even the process of registering a company. How do we get out of this  web?
Well, there is a book I published, Spiritual Walk through the Book of Life. Getting out the quagmire? A lot of the ways that you can use to get out are  in the Bible, the book of life. Whenever I sit down here and begin to think like a human being, I get scared about Nigeria because I have the  opportunity of interfacing as the head of a spiritual church, I get to the level of human beings; young people who are coming up now, a lot of them think that one plus three is eight. We are in trouble!

Who are the young ones that I am going to hand over to? Are these the ones who are going to occupy the seats of leadership of this country tomorrow? I am scared. God did not put together secondary schools, universities, unless you have a Ph.D,  you can’t do this or you can’t do that. That was not done for us by God. But we have put them together as the standard for leadership, as the standard and criteria for achievement and success. How do we fit these human beings who are our children today? The school system today is like a pig going into the mud and then you bring  it  to say; put this white agbada on it.

And for quite some time when I had the opportunity  I  tell  leaders of this country that you can never legislate morality. I started education  in a Muslim school which was built on the land that my grandfather gave to Muslims to build their primary school in Benin City. I spent two years there and I was taught that there is God. I left that place and went to a Catholic school, Holy Cross Primary School. I learnt about God. From there, I came into this church called St. Joseph’s Chosen Church. I learnt about the Holy Spirit; but in the process of it all now, the schools that were set up by these missions were all taken from them by government and government has failed us in the management of the schools. I  had  a lot of disciplining in boarding house at Loyola College; I can’t steal your shirt. In fact, our thinking doesn’t even go towards stealing a pen from you. We were taught to be a man, to clean the environment, to learn the things that will make you know that if you put this water into this mud, it’s not drinkable again. The school system has collapsed.

My wish is; government, get out of it as much as you can. Government should set rules, policies for education and inspect whether Mr. Lagbaja or Mr. Okafor who has set up a school is living by those standards; and the earlier we do it  the better. At the same time, standard, morality…you have to work, make sure you plant a seed of a yam and expect a tuber in about six months instead of taking the seed, eating the flesh in it and, in the process, you know of a farmer who has planted and you go to his farm and harvest and say it is yours.

Today, a lot of people think that you can harvest without sowing. You have to sow seed and the type of food and drink that we should be taking into our systems are all spelt out in the Bible right from Genesis 1:29, it tells you exactly. So, these are the scares I have but I think the solutions are there.
Why is it that it is so difficult to get all these players in the petroleum industry to list in the stock market?
It is as difficult as passing the Petroleum Industry  Bill. If you can tell me why it has taken Nigeria almost four or five years to articulate one bill that will regulate the oil industry, that’s what it is; too many interests. For 24 years that I was at the stock market, I kept writing pre-budget memorandum to the Federal Government telling them to encourage these people to invest in the market only to see that some members of the International Oil Companies (IOC) are as big as Nigeria. They are alternate governments. If you want to pass a law and it doesn’t meet their interest,  forget it. And that’s why they are not in the market.

If two or three companies like Shell, Texaco and Chevron are listed in that market, our market will be one of the largest in the world. What is in the stock market? Transparency and accountability; you hear today that some people have done this and put about N300 billion into their pockets and nobody knows how they did it; stealing in the market.

I said four years ago that one of the things that Chief M.K.O Abiola put me into confidence about, was that should he be elected president of this country, he would make sure that people in the community where oil is being produced would be given special concessions; at least, 15 per cent would be allocated to them to manage. If you as a shareholder in a company, you will make sure that that company is protected. Breaking the pipelines and thieving will not work; but you don’t give out what you don’t own. People who are doing all those things; stealing on the high seas of our crude oil, how did it come about? This is the problem of our stock market.

Just before I left the market, I told them that the oil companies must be listed. How can Shell tell us that it cannot be listed in Nigeria while it is listed in London, in New York and other places? Chevron, Total, Texaco, they are all listed in different stock markets. But they come here to embarrass and disgrace Nigerian government every year with joint venture; ‘ next year, we are going to need about so, so and so billions and Nigerian government doesn’t have the cash to put down’. A sovereign country being embarrassed by a company operating in this country. We are bound. The Lord has blessed us with all these resources; we have not even started looking at our solid minerals yet—diamond, gold, uranium and so on, they are all there. God has done His own and the rest is left to us.

Do you say that we are bound or that we caged ourselves as a result of corruption? People are caught stealing money and nothing happens. There is impunity of the highest order. How do we get out of this cage?
You know, when you start shouting at a certain level, it becomes your language. We have now accepted corruption as a way of life. I hope over the next few years, we will get a Nigerian  leader who will say, ‘I should be paid just N1 a year. Take all my accounts and put them in the public domain.’ ” Of course, there will be free everything that you will need in the office so that you  can be able to take a decision.

Look at the Mayor of the most difficult and powerful city in the world, the Mayor of New York, Bloomberg, he takes just $1 a year as salary. It can be done here. Immediately that concept is accepted, people will know that the person who is sitting there is not there to steal and they won’t want to be a drummer for him. The other day, some people were saying that we are overworking our congressmen and we must pay them. But let’s cut it to size; you and I, we should not work more than four hours in a day and, therefore, your salary should be cut to that level. Just pay them sitting allowance.

When I finished from NSE, there were companies that I knew which could not really pay sufficiently for my directorship; sitting allowance, director’s fee and all that. I have never taken a kobo from; I use my personal transport and other things. The interest is the number of people who are supposed to be working in that company and make sure that the company is self sufficient and be able to take care of the people. The type of goods that they are supposed to manufacture let it be standard.

Are you recommending a revolution?
Yes! A positive revolution! From my Christian point of view, I know that God created me and God is perfect. He doesn’t make mistakes and there is a reason and purpose He created you and I and, if we do look at Him well, He will keep us on track and that track is to continue to develop, grow and live well. He did not create anybody to come and destroy.  God has put together over 150 million people in this country and, certainly, He has a purpose for Nigeria and I am very confident about that. Otherwise, look at our little history; anytime we are at the brink of collapse, He carries us over. He is always there to do that for us and with that, I have a lot of confidence that this country will be great.
Controversies have been trailing some of the female ministers in the present cabinet: the Petroleum and  Aviation Minister. What do you say about these people?
I have been travelling by air. About 20 years ago, the Managing Director of Lufthansa came to my office at the NSE and said that Lufthansa management had elected me a senator for life among Lufthansa passengers. To become a  senator for life, you would have flown about one million miles in the airspace, and that means, going in and out of airports.
In the last five years, I haven’t seen our airports—Lagos, Kano, Abuja, Owerri, Port Harcourt—the way they are today; beautiful, standard. I don’t know what this issue of going to buy two armoured cars…but the number of armoured cars in Nigeria today is more than 2,000. Why the price of what they bought is that, I don’t know. They should give time and space to find out what led to  that.

We are already approaching the end of the year, what’s your message to Nigeria and  the  leaders?   
For 2014, we have come to a conclusion that human beings are made up of three components: spirit, soul and body. Our emphasis over the years as a  spiritual church has always been on the soul; that we make sure that our soul has a place in the kingdom. The spirit is something that God  put in you, immediately you are dying, He takes it back. Your soul as a Christian is what you will work with to get into heaven. As we have journeyed—this church is about 70 years old—all through these years, our emphasis have always been to make sure that our spirit and soul get to heaven; we forget about the body.

But very early in St. Joseph, the Holy Spirit taught us two choruses: “He touched my spirit, He touched my soul and He touched my body and made them one.” Then, later in the years of the existence of this church, He repeated these three components again: “My spirit, soul and body, praise God, my spirit, soul and body, praise the Lord. My spirit, soul and body, shout Alleluia,” because the three of them have been put together to become whole and one and we are beginning to see, hey, what is this? We have not attended to our body.

So, our next statement for the year 2014 conference is: “Eat and Drink the Lord’s Way”. A  lot of sicknesses that we do not know can be put under control if we eat and drink what God asks us to eat. There is a book I will recommend to you which I have always bought and given to friends and it’s called Why Christians get Sick. So, we want to look at what will make our body as strong as our spirit and soul.

Do you subscribe to the partition of the nation as a solution to  the problems we are facing in this country?
No! it’s just like saying that your parents have four children and the only way you can get peace in your family is by going your different ways. It’s the same thing as saying that the world has lots of different languages, colours and so on and the only way the world can be in peace is for us to set up different worlds—you go to Mars, you go to Jupiter and go and stay there. Tolerate each other; love each other, these are what God told us. It is part of that food that I am talking about—eat and drink, live the way God wants you to live, otherwise, you won’t have peace. It is not a question of suppression of people.

So, you are in support of the CONFAB?
Let’s look at our environment, what do we do to restructure the environment that will give us optimal peace? I am not saying maximal, optimal peace, tolerance, co-operation, love. I am a Christian but before I count five or 10 of my best friends, I have perhaps  three to four Muslims that I can sleep with without fear. People are prejudiced before they even meet people they don’t know before; his name is Okonkwo, no ooo; whereas Okonkwo could do better than Alile.