Lawmakers praise the SEC for its fiscal stability

Ibekimi Oriamaja Reports

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) management has received praise for the bold actions it has taken to ensure that the organization achieves financial sustainability.

James Abiodun Faleke, the chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Finance, stated that he was pleased with the various steps the Commission has taken to strengthen its finances during the interactive session on the 2023–2025 Medium Term Expenditure Framework/Fiscal Strategy Paper, or MTEF/FSP, with the House Committee on Finance in Abuja.

“We encouraged you to look within and return the SEC to sustainability when you came here last year, and I am delighted you have done so and that you are meeting expectations,” Faleke said. While simultaneously encouraging you to work more, I want to thank you for your efforts.

Director-General of the SEC, Mr. Lamido Yuguda, had already claimed that the Commission would have a particularly difficult time in 2020 and 2021 because of its deficit.

He claimed: “When we took over, it was really challenging, but we guaranteed the National Assembly that we were going to take certain initiatives to make this deficit a thing of the past, and our story this year is that we have actually turned the corner.

You can actually observe a difference in the way we manage the Commission’s finances by comparing our 2021 and 2020 budgets with those for 2022 and the first half of that year. It displays our 2022 budget as well as the real vacation time for the first six months of that year. You can see that while we initially budgeted for a deficit of N1.6 billion, we actually ended the first half with a surplus of about N2.5 billion.

He noted that the presentation is a summary of the kind of efforts the current management has undertaken over the past few years to position the Commission on the path of fiscal sustainability.

“Yuguda told the members that the SEC has so far carried out its promise to reduce the top heavy structure in the Commission by offering some top personnel a voluntary exit package.

He said, “Mr. Chairman we were top heavy and we said before this committee that we had a plan to offer a voluntarily early exit to some of our top personnel and I am happy to report that at the end of last year we offered this scheme and quite a number of our staff took the offer and we were able to substantially reduce our work force by almost 30 per cent.

He noted that although the Commission makes more money when the economy is healthy, he also stated that due to the current form of the economy, there was the need to minimize cost to guarantee

He acknowledged that the commission has been managing a market that has been negatively impacted by the coronavirus epidemic under very challenging conditions, but he gave the assurance that measures are being taken to ensure that the SEC’s fortunes continue to improve.

“If we look at 2022 and 2023 in the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework that we started last year, you will see that we have worked on our expenditure and the deficit is now turning into a surplus,” the speaker said. We therefore need the support of all to engineer the kind of transition we are thinking of at the SEC.