Question time — for the Private Sector

 

SOUTH AFRICA- Whether it is the Marikana tragedy, the lack of transformation in the mining industry or that the economic growth rate of a country with such an active business community is revised to 1.5% (or that our sophisticated economy has been overtaken by Nigeria as the biggest on the continent) it is curious that business leaders have never been seriously critiqued for their role in this downward spiral.

NSIA moves to revive Nigeria’s Commodity Exchange

The Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA), managers of the nation’s Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) has expressed interest in reviving the country’s Commodity Exchange,  a process which government  authorities estimate could cost as much as $20 million.

The government has scheduled the comatose Abuja Securities and Commodity Exchange (ASCE) for privatisation, but the NSIA and industry experts fear that selling the company at its present state would come at a loss, since the assets are almost worthless.

NSIA Manager

The NSIA’s interest is therefore in pre-privatisation investments which would mean fixing the software to drive an efficient trading platform and putting  proper processes and procedures in place, till a point that the Exchange can start trading.

The Abuja Securities Commodity Exchange (ASCE) is no longer functional, having stopped trading several years back, but it has up to 60 staff who do nothing but collect salaries at the end of each month, BusinessDay discovered.

NSIA authorities are already in early talks with the government to allow them make that very important pre-privatisation investment and bring the Commodity Exchange to an operational level, in exchange for shares in the company before it is finally privatised.

Richardson Okechukwu, speaks needs for ‘Government, Private Sector Partnerships to Nigeria’s Agric Revolution’

Richardson Okechukwu, project coordinator for the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the British-American Tobacco Nigeria Foundation (BATNF) Cassava Project was at the Flag-off and Inputs Distribution Ceremony for Otu, Ogboro and Igboho which took place at Otu Community Hall, Itesiwaju LGA, Oyo State, last week. He speaks on the Cassava Project and the need for a sustained collaboration between the government and the private sector to drive the nation’s agriculture revolution, among other sundry issues. Excerpt:

 

How do you describe the partnership between IITA and BATNF so far

Well, it has been a very complementary. One, at IITA we are technical experts, we always interact with the farmers and we always hear their complaints about what they would love to do and what they would love to achieve. On major thing they always lack is the resources to get the inputs that they need to implement the technical knowledge that they have learnt from what we are teaching them.

This, for many years, has been affecting adoption; it’s been affecting seeing the new faces of the farmers that we have been talking about. You know, people don’t like farmers because of the way they look and all those kinds of things.

Then you wonder how come we do this thing every year they are still doing this business of farming. We have found out that the main problem is lack of resources to implement these technologies. So the BATN Foundation provided this great opportunity for 110 people to have these inputs that cover everything from land preparation, planting materials, technical resource persons to be in ground, herbicides and fertilizers to be provided for them.

So what remains is the actualisation of those findings and results that we have been telling them is possible. So it is no longer business as usual. The beautiful thing here is that the BATN Foundation has made it a grant; but it will turn out to be a revolving fund, that at the exit of the Foundation, the grant will still be there for this group of farmers to access, to plant and to be on their own. Also, there are some elements of sustainability which you cannot find in other relationships. But we have it found in this one.

So IITA is bringing on board its partners to make sure that every missing gap like marketing, forming of cooperatives, group dynamics, conflict resolution between crop farmers and livestock farmers and all those kinds of hiccups are all addressed; so that we can see how this model can be a good example for many other people to adopt.

So how long has this partnership on the distribution scheme been on

SEC Investigates Private Placements’ Defaulters

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has commenced investigation of companies that floated private placements not yet quoted on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE),  sources at the commission confirmed on Tuesday.

SEC moves followed the discomfort which the unfortunate development is causing the investing public and the huge funds trapped in the stagnated investment.

“Specifically the management has written the companies involved, especially those that indicated intention to list on the nation bourse in their prospectus during the funds raising,” the source said.