Business
Proshare provokes debate on AMCON’s continued existence
Recently, Proshare elicited highly intellectualised discourse on AMCON with the innocuous title : AMCON: Time to say goodbye .
The above is the title of Proshare Analysts note following what could read as an inquisitionary analysis of state of AMCON.
Proshare submitted in a gritty detachment that it’s time for an undertaker to move in on AMCON, as the Assets Management Company of Nigeria has become something of museum piece, an anachronism.
It’s as if Proshare has opened the proverbial Pandora box, as the social media responded with a slew of opinions by commentators on the continued viability or otherwise of AMCON as an interventionist force to rein in banks’ failures and to give depositors succour and redemption from the harsh vicissitudes and vagaries of banks’ fortunes.
This simple intellectual and economic exercise by Proshare has led to an avalanche of positions for and against the continued retention of AMCON by the federal government.
The welter of opinions on AMCON has dovetailed into binary of hawks and doves, the former insisting on the anachronism of AMCON and calling for undertaker’s job on it while the latter have marshalled arguments for the continued stay of AMCON on so many grounds.
The Hawks are of the view that AMCON has outlived its usefulness, adding that the hefty bureaucracy that encumbered action in the interventionist agency is enough totem for its scrapping, not to talk of its burgeoning court cases, slow pace of debt recovery and huge indebtedness to Central Bank amongst other hiccups that have belched any arguments for its retention, the Doves on the other hand, have looked in the direction of assumed resilience of AMCON, the timeliness of its intervention, and the likelihood of a future intervention needs which a scrapping today will create a gapping holes in future and the need to adopt a Malaysian model to smoothen the rough edges of its current configuration as reasons for continued stay of it.
Both the Doves and the Hawks have marshalled powerful set of arguments to advance their positions, leaving the floor open-ended for mediatory or extreme position of contributors in the dichotomy of options either for or against the retention of AMCON.
The beauty of the highly informed debate is the high pitched resonance of the points raised by either side to the AMCON question, thus raising the bar of discursive commentary by stakeholders and others interested in quick resolution of the AMCON debate.
Proshare has once again proved its mettle as a leader in provoking healthy debate on issues in our economy with the aim of not a quick fix but highly informed resolution anchored on pragmatism, long term solutions that will promote the overall health of macroeconomics while not doing injustice to microeconomics.