President Muhammadu Buhari has appointed a new Director-General to head Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The body, which regulates the Nigerian stock market, will now have a substantive head for the first time in three years. On Tuesday, May 19, the Senate had received a letter from President Buhari requesting the confirmation of Lamido Yuguda as the new Director-General of the commission. The letter was read out at the legislative chamber by Senate President Ahmad Lawan.
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The letter also asked the senate to confirm three nominees as full-time commissioners of the SEC. They include Reginald C Karausa, Ibrahim D Boyi, and Obi Joseph.
Mr. Yuguda will be replacing Mrs. Mary Uduk, who became acting head of the market regulator in April 2018.
Lamido Yuguda has a B.Sc in Accounting from the Ahmadu Bello University, and an M.Sc in Money, Banking and Finance from the University of Birmingham, UK. He also possesses a certificate in Financial Asset Management and Engineering from the Swiss Finance Institute, Geneva, Switzerland.
He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN) and a designated Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).
Starting in 1984, Yuguda served in various roles in the CBN, including as Senior Supervisor, Foreign Operations Department, Senior Manager of the Investment Office, and as a pioneer staff at the Debt Conversion Committee Secretariat.
Between 1997 and 2001, he worked as an economist in the Africa Department of the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC. He returned to the CBN in 2001 and was part of a team that led extensive reforms to the apex bank’s foreign reserve portfolio management system.
Yuguda retired after serving as Director of the Reserve Management Department, a position he held from 2010-2016.
His appointment to the role of Director General at the SEC comes after the protracted controversy around the commission. Its last substantive head, Mounir Gwarzo, was fired in November 2017 after an inquiry found him guilty of awarding contracts to his own company and taking a severance package from the SEC while he was in charge at the institution.
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Many stakeholders have expressed surprise at the President’s apparent decision to overlook Uduk, the acting Director-General, for the role of substantive DG. Earlier reports suggested that she was in line to assume full leadership of the body.
The government will trust Yuguda, the SEC’s new helmsman, to stir the commission through the current period of uncertainty for Nigeria’s stock markets.
Featured image source: Nairametrics
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