It is about 120 days and 120 nights since the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (Amcon) paid the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) to acquire the shares of three bridge banks-Mainstreet, Enterprise and Keystone. It was a very confusing pronouncement whose content kept analysts guessing for a good number of days. What made everything more confusing was the speed at which two principal issues were handled within a spate of five hours.

These are truly trying times for investors in the Nigerian equity market. The market is illiquid and has been on an interminable downtrend. By last Monday, The Nigerian Stock Exchange had lost 13.05 per cent on a year-to-date basis, and it looks like it is nowhere near the bottom yet. Not a few investors have been ruined.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala will resume this week as Nigeria’s Minister of Finance! Come September, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala will be guest to the World Bank once again. It would be a home coming for someone who just vacated office one month ago. It will be another way of explaining the value of quality in human development. This kind of move is strictly reserved for people whose work could speak volumes, even when there are no benevolent spirits around them. 

Two years is a whole lot of time: enough to grow ideas and plans to magnificent importance. In leadership and management, such period had been used to make expressions bordering on efficiency and capacity. It is a period enough to build and consolidate on any strategic development programme. Any working plan that does not mature and begin to yield fruits within that period is either ill-conceived, poorly implemented or managed by very wrong hands.

Obviously, politicians are full of promises. In fact, they are made of promises. This is why it can not be very easy to say whether they can be held responsible for anything they told us while on the soapbox or the promises they make in close-door sessions as they hunt to realise their  mandates.

When Tony Elumelu succumbed to Sanusi’s tenure deal with bankers, many knew that a lot would be unfolding. The reason was that Elumelu was forced out when the time was getting ripe for him to play the real game of banking. Five years after causing the biggest excitement in merger and acquisition in the country, he was believed to have been spoiling for more big games that would create an edge for his bank.

IN line with its corporate social responsibility policy, Shoprite, the leading supermarket chain across Africa with a growing presence in Nigeria , has extended its ‘Help-Change-a-Life” initiative in the month of February by donating a total sum of four hundred and sixty eight thousand, three hundred and thirteen Naira (N468, 313).

UNION Bank will not die, after all! That was the subject of all the hues and cries from all corners since the last one and half years. Because Union Bank  has been like primus inter paris in the Nigerian banking sector, it was seen as the major bank used  in many parts of the world as the Nigerian banking exemplar. Many had seen the actions and inactions around it as simply debilitating and were driven by emotion and passion in passing both admiration and aspersion.