The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Nigeria on Sunday disclosed that it remitted N1.5 billion into the Federation Account, representing 25 percent of its gross revenue as at June 2021.
The commission’s Director General, Mr. Lamido Yuguda, made the disclosure in a statement issued to clarify the responses he made during a meeting with a joint Committee of the Senate on Finance, National Planning, Petroleum Upstream, Downstream and Gas during the week.
He assured the lawmakers of the commission’s returning to profitability within the next two years following cost-cutting measures already put in place by the management.
The Director General explained: “I ask the Committee to really look at the SEC because even the numbers that we are calling out, since June of 2020 the SEC has been paying 25 percent of its gross revenue to the treasury and this I understand is an arrangement that only a few agencies of government have been paying.
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“We have been paying 25 percent of gross revenues and the total so far paid to the treasury as at the end of June 2021 is about N1.5 billion.
“The SEC is a fully self-financed agency of government; we do not receive a single kobo from the government. So we are fully self-financing and we have to have a complement of staff that is fit for purpose to regulate the capital market. Now because of the vagaries of the capital market, it is not possible
“This arrangement has had the blessing of government and this is an arrangement that we inherited in 2020 when we came into office. This has not been created by this management; the SEC has been allowed to keep these investments that have been absolving that deficit”, Yuguda added.
The Director General, who pointed out that the Commission had been operating under very difficult fiscal situation due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the capital market and the economy in the past two years, said the commission’s management was taking steps to turn-around the fortunes of the market regulator.
He expatiated: “If we go through the MTEF 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 N1.235 billion and by 2024 we should have N2.5 billion surplus.
“We therefore need the support of all to engineer the kind of transition we are thinking of at the SEC and that 30 percent 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”, he added.
