By Owei Lakemfa
THE Securities  and Exchange Commission(SEC) finally woke from its deep slumber to sack Professor Ndidi Okereke-Onyuike, the Director General of the Nigeria Stock Exchange(NSE).  Also falling under the axe is the NSE Council and its president, Alhaji Aliko Dangote. Onyuike  had sailed from the New York Exchange to the NSE in 1983 as a consultant and metamorphosed into the Exchange’s boss.
Her reign was a beautiful choreograph of blazing publicity and she had come to so personalise the Exchange that in one of my articles against the unfolding disaster in the institution, I titled it “The Ndidi Stock Exchange (NSE)”, for which her supporters saddled me with a heap of insults. I was similarly bombarded  for my Wednesday June 10, 2009 article in this column titled: “The Rape Of NITEL” in which as before, I drew attention to her excesses and connivance in subverting the Stock Exchange. In that column I had written:

“Finally, the Obasanjo government announced it had found the perfect company to buy NITEL, it turned out to be the Transnational Corporation of Nigeria (TRANSCORP), a contraption with doubtful origins in which Obasanjo as President had huge shares. What was also intriguing about TRANSCORP was that it was chaired by the Director General of the Nigeria Stock Exchange, Mrs. Ndidi Okereke-Onyiuke; it was a case of the centre referee in a football game also being the striker of one of the competing teams”.

In that column, I had also complained about the criminal manner the TRANSCORP was deliberately fleecing the company. I wrote that  under the leadership of  Onyuike,

“TRANSCORP completed the NITEL rape began by PENTASCOPE and the BPE.  Between TRANSCORP and BPE, NITEL choice properties across the country were auctioned at give- away prices.  The NITEL Training School which itself is a whole village and the only such school in the country, was sold as were NITEL offices and exchanges.  Even its poles were sold and the staff left without salaries for 11 months.

The NITEL official market share tumbled from 15 per cent to 0.03 per cent. The GSM arm, MTEL which had 1.3 million subscribers now has a few thousand. Yet at inception, MTEL had the widest reach of all the GSM companies in the country”.

I had called on the Yar’Adua  administration as part of its anti-corruption crusade to prosecute Onyuike and her collaborators for their deliberate mismanagement of NITEL and asset-stripping, but no known move was made, and this gang continued its inglorious march until she was sacked last Wednesday. Onyuike seemed untouchable and was just a few weeks from her retirement which might have guaranteed her ‘legacy’ in the NSE.

She was maintained in her position for so long  due to the wobbly Nigerian system of inefficiency, political interferences, lack of standards, ethics and professionalism, and the spinelessness, myopia and gross incompetence of so-called regulation and anti-corruption agencies.

Onyuike should have been sacked over four years ago  for her role in the formation of TRANSCORP which was essentially an instrument to corner the country’s wealth. It succeeded in taking over the Hilton Hotel in Abuja, some oil concerns and, of course, NITEL  whose seizure was quite controversial. Onyuike had announced that TRANSCORP bought 75 per cent of NITEL, while in truth it paid for about 51 per cent.

She had named British Telecom and some international   telecom providers as the TRANSCORP technical partners, which turned out to be false.

As NSE Director General, she had muscled the business community under a so-called Corporate Nigeria  to raise re-election funds for then President Olusegun Obasanjo. If another candidate, say, Muhammadu Buhari had won that election,  the NSE might have been turned upside down by the new government.

She was simply a DG that had no limitations, could not caution herself, was not open to simple advice, would not be guided by professional ethics, and was, essentially, a loose cannon in a sensitive  establishment like the Stock  Exchange which is supposed to thrive on trust, confidence, and transparency.

When the American presidential campaigns were on, she put together a so-called “Africa For Obama” contraption with which she raised some N100 million allegedly for the Barack Obama campaigns.

It was a crude and ridiculous move as Obama was known to have rejected corporate lobbyist funds and opted to get the average American buy into his campaign by willingly donating $5 each. The Obama team rightly exposed and denounced  the Onyuike gambit and she was forced to return most of the money.

On August 4, 2009, the courts restrained the NSE from holding its elections but Onyuike with the active support of the SEC pointedly ignored the courts, and got Dangote elected NSE president.

But how come an ordinary Nigerian like me with a bias for literature and not for economics, accountancy or the sciences, and just a passing interest in the stock exchange, could over the years see through the masquerading in the NSE and the dangers it portends, while the colony of bureaucrats in the SEC, the legion of giants in industry, the long army of stock brokers and the chain of security agencies could not? The truth is that they did, but merely looked the other way.

The SEC has now promised to conduct an “independent” investigation into  the dealings in the NSE that has led to its near collapse, but can we trust a SEC that had connived with NSE to violate court orders  and has been soundly asleep over the years, to carry out such a sensitive  assignment?

The truth is that the SEC itself needs to be probed. I would have been tempted to appeal to the  Senate to probe both agencies except that only last week, in the face of the accusations of gross mismanagement and  financial insolvency proffered against the NSE by Dangote, the Senate Committee went to the NSE to issue it a clean bill of health.

It appears that the best body that can probe the  NSE, restore investors confidence  and bring culprits to book is the Presidency.