The Director-general, of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Lamido Yuguda, says the commission remitted the sum of N1.5billion to the federal government treasury as at the end of June 2021.
He disclosed this in a statement while responding to comments attributed to the Nigerian Senate that SEC was gradually becoming insolvent and could go bankrupt soon.
According to him, the commission has been paying 25 per cent of gross revenues into the coffers of government and that plans were underway to reduce its operating costs in order to boost profitability within the next two years.
He lamented that the commission has been operating under very difficult circumstances especially as it is currently superintending over a market that was affected by the negative impact of the COVID19 pandemic, but assured that steps are being taken to reverse the fortunes of the commission.
“If we go through the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework which we started last year, if we look at 2022 and 2023, you will see that we have worked on our expenditure so that by 2023, the deficit will actually turn into a surplus of N1.23billion and by 2024 we should have N2.5billion surplus.
“We therefore need the support of all to engineer the kind of transition we are thinking of at the SEC and that 30 per cent which is taking most of the staff cost is part of the set we are targeting for the early retirement programme.
“There is a lot of interest within the Commission to do it but we are really short of the funds to do it now. We have done a lot of revenue rising drives just to ensure that the Commission stays on track. This is something we are mindful of and we have the intent and capacity to deliver on this,” the statement read.
On the high overhead costs, Yuguda explained that it was being reduced aggressively.
“It has reduced because we have since we came, aggressively looked at the overhead and staff cost and reduced certain components of our staff pay that has generated over N2billion of savings as at now. If you take the MTEF numbers, as you go forward, you find that by 2024 staff cost reduces to only N5.88billion. So that is the trajectory that we are working on.”
To shore up the resources of SEC, he said the Commission had approached a number of institutions like the African Development Bank, Financial Sector Development Africa and a number of other donors and was hoping to get a grant figure of N3.84 billion.
