Former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Charles Soludo on Tuesday said that no amount of reforms or regulations will stop the stock market from crashing in the future.
Mr Soludo made the remark while speaking before the House of Representatives ad-hoc committee investigating the near collapse of the capital market.
“Stock market crashes will always happen. There is no amount of reforms or regulations that will stop future ones from happening,” he said.
Mr Soludo said that if what the committee was seeking to achieve is to stop the collapse of the stock market, then “it should transform from being an ad hoc to a permanent committee, because there will be future ones to come.”
He said that the consolidation of banks is a key factor to what is now the Nigerian capital market.
The former CBN governor said his assurances while he was in office that the Nigerian economy will not experience a recession proved to be right as the economy withstood the turbulent global meltdown.
The Minister of State of Finance, Yerima Ngama, also appeared before the committee.
He told the committee what he felt were some of the causes of the crisis in the market.
“There is one particular bank that invested N240 billion in its own shares, of course, the Central Bank will not know. They will just see that it is invested in shares. But if SEC has been exchanging this information with the Central Bank or if they are even talking, even talking in a club, this information would have come to light. So there is just lack of communication among regulators,” the Minister said.
Responding to questions on whether the Director General of the Security and Exchange Commission is qualified to hold that position, Mr Ngama said that “you can have the certificate and go to the school, but one day you can choose to be incompetent.”