Since his appointment by President Muhammadu Buhari to head Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission, Lamido Yuguda has brought nothing but a boisterous and effective regulatory mechanism to the financial market.
The Commission’s responsibility which includes but is not limited to protecting the investing public and ensuring financial market stability has never been more highlighted than in Yuguda’s leadership.
In this interview, the Director General of the SEC examines knotty issues affecting the nation’s capital market. Excerpt.
The Commission has done a lot about the unclaimed dividend, by working with the registrars to be sure that dividends are now distributed by electronically through the bank accounts of investors rather than through dividend warrants that used to be the case.
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The problem is that people need to mandate their accounts, that is you need to provide your account details to the registrars so that the registrars can credit your account directly with these dividends.
We observed that there are issues with that process, right now unfortunately you will still need to go to each and every registrar that you deal with to give the same information.
Right now what we are doing is to try to get one point of supplying that information because you give it to one registrar you do not need to provide that information across all the other registrars and these registrars, of course, will automatically get your details.
The second thing we have done is enlightenment, people need to be enlightened, a lot of changes have happened in the market and the fact that many people have not mandated their accounts means that many people are unaware of this e-dividend management mandate system.
Also, companies have changed their names, companies that used to be called one name have changed to another and not all investors are aware that these companies have changed their names and if they are having papers reflecting the old name you find out that they may be confused and unaware of where to go.
What we are doing is trying to create more awareness of the way the capital market is organized so that investors can get their dividends back.