National Wire About Nigerians, Nigerian Business and Other Stories
Dayo Emmanuel
Managing Director of Hallmack newspaper, Mr. Teslim Shitta-Bey, has enjoined business journalists in Nigeria to equip themselves with adequate financial tools to help investors and other stakeholders with information regarding their investments.
Shitta-Bey gave the call while addressing the alumni of Bloomberg Media Initiative for Africa (BMIA) Cohort 4 at the Media Career Centre, Lagos on Wednesday.
In his presentation titled Banks in 2017: Looking Back To The Future, the economic analyst gave the different stages industries do go through. He also asked what stage the Nigerian banking industry presently is. “A normal industry should have an emerging state, growing stage, maturity stage and a decline stage. What stage is the Nigerian bank presently? He asked.
According to him, each stage has its characteristics. “Each stage has its peculiar characteristics; when you are in the growing stage, the profit is usually greater than your cash flow, by the next stage the cash flow starts getting bigger than your profit, when you look at Nigerian banks, are the profit slowing down? They are not and these are tools you need as journalists for you to say an industry is declining,” he said.
He also enjoined financial journalists to read between the lines while going through financial books of banks. “When you have the account of any bank, look for the operating cash flow, look at the profit before tax. Journalists need to uncover the shenanigans in the banks in the interest of the investors, the stakeholders and the general public,” he said, adding that, “When you see cash flow higher than profits even after tax then you must watch the trend. The profit figure of the banking sector is not crucial to us but the cash flow. Anybody can come up with cash flow. Nigerian banking system has its strong point and we thank God for that, but they have massive challenges,” he stated.
Talking about the problems of the Nigerian banks, Shitta-Bey said, “The banks in Nigeria have liquidity problems as well as capital challenges but they do not have profitability challenge. Definitely they are not liquid. I did the analysis of GTB and UBA and I know what I found.”
Continuing, he said “You would see how the impairment increases every year by 11%. That tells you a lot that your economy is growing by 1.9% and bank impairment growing by even 10% then there is problem.
Appreciating sponsor of the BMIA, Mr. Michael Bloomberg, Shitta-Bey said, “We all owe our country a responsibility. I thank God you all went through the Bloomberg course. If Mr. Bloomberg were here I would have thanked him for sponsoring you.”
Extolling Bloomberg’s virtue, he said despite being a comfortable billionaire, Bloomberg chose to serve as Mayor of New York, an equivalence of a Local Government Chairman in Nigeria.
“He was the Mayor of New York for years despite being a billionaire. He didn’t go for governorship or the presidency and that is what we should emulate. Everybody comes from the community. He went to be a local government chairman,” he relayed.
“Every politics is local, you must go back to develop your community whether you are self-made or not. As a billionaire you have to develop your community, there are indigent students there are things that need to be developed, you can influence things. We are all sitting down and saying Nigeria has problems, have we attempted a solution?” he asked.
