In the Northern region, we had the groundnut pyramids that was the hallmark of trade there with several developments and growth occurring in that region, symbolized by several institutions and in the Eastern region we had palm oil and coal, used to advance the region in terms of development and growth and symbolized by the Nnamdi Azikwe University and several institutions there. We essentially ran a federating system that ensured equity in the allocation and distribution of resources that led to equitable development of Nigeria, until the Military stepped in and introduced a Unitary system and the whole thing went south. Right now, we purportedly are running a federal system in a democratic setting, but what we run is a quasi-unitary-federal system with the states going bowl in hand to the center, Abuja to beg for allocations and the instrument of state, Continue reading →
“The country was at one time very prosperous, and powerful, but there is probably no other country on this earth more torn and wasted by internal dissensions, tribal jealousies, and fratricidal feuds, a state of things which unhappily continues up to the present time.”
Dr. O Johnson, History of the Yorubas, Published 1921
This is the sad reality of our nation this day. Even though, the above quote was directed at the Yorubas as at then, it in no small measure fits into the modern reality of our beloved Nation Nigeria.
It is not far-fetched nor hearsay that our nation is on the brink of a second civil war with imminent breakup going by the various agitations all around the country and deep-seated mistrust to other ethnic groups and nationalities and amongst ethnic configuration as well.
This last December 2020, I travelled with my family to spend the Christmas with my Mum as I usually do. It’s always a special experience for me and a time to bond with my siblings and take a break essentially from the hustle and bustle of Lagos, especially the traffic…but sadly Ibadan is wearing that traffic cap of Lagos now.
“This is not a surprise at all this is a coup!” That was the exclamation of my Mum last Saturday, 27th March 2021. And I have a good feeling about it…want to know what transpired? Follow me.
Select Performance Indices of the Nigerian Capital Market (Continued)
2. Total Equity Listed
Every corporation that wants to trade in the Nigerian Capital Market, must be listed and their data and numbers reported accurately and timely as much as possible. And this process often requires an intermediary to validate and verify all equity transactions to be listed.
If all the equities to be listed are on a smart contract in a decentralized ledger system, numbers, data and information would be readily available at the speed of light. This would drive efficiency and effectiveness in the Nigerian Capital Market and boost Continue reading →
“Storing and agreeing datasets of financial obligations and ownership forms the basic core of capital markets operations. The current methods are overly complex, utilize fragmented IT and data architectures and suffer from a lack of common standards. This creates the continual need to reconcile data with massive systems and process duplication, leading to high costs and protracted time to execute tasks. Could blockchain be the structural change the market needs?” (Oliver Wyman and Euroclear, February 2016).
The Nigerian Capital Market has different operational departments and activities that interact with each other and plays a role in the Capital Market ecosystem. Not only that, the vision, “To be Africa’s modern efficient, and internationally competitive Continue reading →
“The Nigerian capital market has since been the meeting point for buyers and sellers of shares, bonds, stocks and for the exchange of other intrinsic commodities for the purposes of raising capital for the running the business operations…” (Praise & Maria, 2019) . The Capital Market is regarded as the cornerstone for every financial system since it provides the much-needed funds for financing, economic growth and government spending. This position was opined by (Nwankwo, 1991) , that Continue reading →
According to (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2016), “This new digital ledger of economic transactions can be programmed to record virtually everything of value and importance to humankind: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, financial accounts, medical procedures, insurance claims, votes, provenance of food, and anything else that can be expressed in code”. That is, Blockchain can virtually do anything that interface with human interaction if it can be programmed to do so effectively, bringing about a reconciliation of digital records in real time for all transactions carried out
Blockchain enables top notch record keeping, “they can be used to create a clear timeline of who did what and when” (Laurence, 2019). Industries and regulatory bodies spend countless hours and billions in trying to carry out forensic audit to know who did what and when. But this can be eliminated with the use of Blockchain technology. Deloitte, in a report sponsored by them identified an application area for Blockchain and stated that, “…financial executives expect that blockchain will rapidly be adopted for use in other scenarios involving payments, like capital markets and contracts” (FINANCIAL EXECUTIVES INTERNATIONAL, 2018).
Concept of Smart Contracts and Decentralized/Distributed Ledgers
Decentralized/Distributed Ledgers: “A distributed ledger is a database that is consensually shared and synchronized across multiple sites, institutions or geographies. It allows transactions to have public “witnesses,” thereby making a cyberattack more difficult.”(MAJASKI, 2019). According to a World Bank report,” Distributed ledgers use independent computers (referred to as nodes) to record, share and synchronize transactions in their respective electronic ledgers (instead of keeping data centralized as in a traditional ledger).”(The World Bank, 2018). Distributed ledgers, in a nutshell are transactions that are easily accessible by users thus promoting transparency and real time value, but are not easily modified without the knowledge or input of all the users. Basically it gives power to the users across different locations to make their input into a transaction or process without the imbroglio or burden of having to route it through a central server and be dependent on one person to upload and update. Distributed ledgers afford for trust to be divested from one person or system to several connected node systems that is “failproof”, reliable and real time in operation
Benefits:
It gives control of all its information and transactions to the users and promotes transparency. Thus, transaction time is minimized to minutes and are processed 24/7 saving businesses billions.
This technology also facilitates increased back-office efficiency and automation. It cuts down on operational inefficiencies which ultimately is cost saving to any organisation.
It provides greater security due to the decentralized nature and transparency and the fact that the ledgers are immutable. This is a far cry from centralized ledgers that are prone to cyber-attacks and system downtime.
Christina Majaski aptly sums it up broadly as, “Distributed ledger technology has great potential to revolutionize the way governments, institutions, and corporate work. It can help governments in tax collection, issuance of passports, record land registries, licenses and outlay of social security benefits as well as voting procedures.” (MAJASKI, 2019)
Smart Contracts:
According to Tiana Lawrence, “A smart contract is computer code that is written inside a blockchain protocol. Smart contracts are created to facilitate, verify, or enforce the pre-negotiated terms between two or more parties” (Laurence, 2019). It can further be defined as,” … systems which automatically move digital assets according to arbitrary pre-specified rules” (Buterin, Accessed 28th Dec 2019). Smart Contracts enable two or more individuals to work together without the question of trust coming up or a need for a higher authority to authorize or arbitrate on a transaction. It offers a systemized process of conveying information and carrying out transactions from one point to another with the assurance that information herein contained is secured and accessible by all stakeholders without a third-party interference. Apart from a smart contract defining the rules of engagement in an agreement, it also defines the penalties to be executed like the way traditional contracts operates. It automatically enforces obligations in a contractual agreement. Smart Contracts can be used in different sectors and industries, from legal process, healthcare, insurance, financial derivatives etc. They operate using the blockchain principle and technology as well. It simplifies and automates routine repetitive process which enhances productivity and effectiveness. “Blockchain-based smart contracts are helping make business and other transactions more secure, efficient and cost-effective.”(Rouse, Sales, & Cole, April 2018).In a report sponsored by Deloitte, it states that, “…blockchain-based smart contracts will allow companies to pull data from their financial statements in order to fulfill their contractual obligations…With a smart contract, any transaction is publicly available and can be seen.” (FINANCIAL EXECUTIVES INTERNATIONAL, 2018)
Benefits of smart contracts but not limited to these are:
Cost saving and operational effectiveness.
Increases processing speed and turnaround time in any transaction or business activities.
Creates an autonomy that is devoid of third-party participation except the concerned stakeholders.
Offers an immutable reliability. That is, data entered in cannot be altered nor changed and stakeholders are protected at each block node of information created and as well can see the details of the transaction being carried out.
With these benefits there are demerits to the use of smart contracts. Key among the disadvantages is lack of international regulations focusing on blockchain technology thus making it difficult to monitor the operations in a global economy. They are also difficult to amend and implement. While this can also be seen as a major plus for Smart Contracts, it’s also a demerit in the sense that, “…the parties cannot make any changes to the smart contract agreement or incorporate new details without developing a new contract.” (Rouse, Sales, & Cole, April 2018)
“Every new economic age in modern history has been driven by an explosion of technological innovation that results in increased efficiency, throughput, and coordination. The result has been sharp and steady growth in global GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and wellbeing… As humans have marched from revolution to revolution, we have built out systems and technologies that have raised the quality of life for so many. But all these developments have rested on a single, somewhat flimsy foundation: the base trust layer of our societies. People need trust between one another in order to perform even the most rudimentary transactional tasks. Thus far, all the base trust layers in our societies have been founded on subjective trust, including:
trust in a single individual, or
in interpersonal social networks, or
in platforms like businesses and institutions, or
In large centralized authorities, like governments.”(Joseph Lubin | Founder of ConsenSys, et al., April 2019).[1]
Because of this trust level, we have built up centralized systems that controls virtually all aspects of transactional behavior and human interaction. We have come to build adept reliance on centralized trust and built up systems, infrastructures, and a whole lot around it, that should it fail, we are often left reeling in shock and disappointment with no apparent solution in place. So, there is now a need to have a better system that rests on improved technology, on which political, economic and commerce systems can run and function effectively without fear of failure nor system compromise.
The Nigerian Capital Market is an institution that has been built on a centralized system, which essentially governs its operations and provides a framework on which it works to fulfil its mandate. The Nigeria Capital Market has over the years, made remarkable progress but it’s not at the peak of its performance based on global best practice, which necessitated exploring avenues and means that the operations of the market can be better improved, and better quality service delivered. With the speed at which technology is evolving, there is the need for it to be positioned and in league with Capital Markets across the world has they seek to improve their operations and activities with the use of Blockchain Technology.
In essence, the concept of distributed ledger, which epitomizes the Blockchain Technology is being adopted by various industries across the world, and several researches are being carried out exploring the potential benefits and ease that it brings into workflow and day to day corporate activities. Therefore, for the Nigerian Capital Market to be of global reckoning on the world stage, there is the need to explore and conduct a research on the potentials of Blockchain Technology and exercise patience with its development and investment in infrastructures that would lead to its full utilization.
WHAT IS BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
The world is constantly evolving and innovating. And technology has been at the forefront of this change. Technology was at the forefront of industrial revolution, all the way to the dotcom era and to the present age of smart technology. Technology is forever bringing about a change, to the way things are done. Blockchain Technology has been posited as the future of financial transactions and a whole lot more of different transactions as the technology gets unraveled and its application across different sectors and industries is discovered. The fact that this Blockchain Technology is encrypted, secured and transparent out of the many numerous benefits makes it a technology worth researching on for its varied applications.
Blockchain technology was first described in a Bitcoin whitepaper circulated online in 2008 by a pseudonymous name, Satoshi Nakamoto in which he described a peer-to-peer electronic cash system of financial transactions that does not need a network of banks nor financial institutions to operate. He described it as,” a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power (Nakamoto, October 2008 Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf). (Joseph Lubin | Founder of ConsenSys, et al., April 2019) defined it as “a next-generation database technology through which trust can be automated and established on a peer-to-peer basis”. He stated further that, Blockchain technology takes away the concept of subjective centralized trust which world systems is built on and replaces it with automated objective trust, “in which Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies allow us to improve upon the extraordinary scale, efficiency, and processes that modern industries have built.
Just had the heart-breaking task of seating through my cousin’s funeral, Captain Omitola Falana. He died in active service in Katsina on the 24th of September 2020. His wife couldn’t even see his body as he was shot in the head at close range after being Continue reading →
