TheCable

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has announced plans to lower its operating costs in order to boost profitability in the next two years.

Lamido Yuguda, SEC director-general, said this in a statement issued on Sunday.

Yuguda said SEC has been paying 25 percent of its gross revenue to the federal government, adding that the total revenue paid into the government’s treasury as at June 31, 2021, was N1.5 billion.

He said the regulatory agency had been operating under difficult circumstances due to the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“If we go through the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (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 N1.24 billion and by 2024 we should have N2.5 billion surplus,” he said.

“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.”

Yuguda said the commission has approached some multilateral development institutions such as the African Development Bank (AfDB) and other donors for a grant of N3.84 billion to shore up its resources.

He said more funds are being expected in the near term to boost operations, adding that the grants would be invested in IT infrastructure for the commission which has been “obsolete” for over a decade.

The senate joint committees on finance, national planning, petroleum upstream, downstream and gas — chaired by Solomon Olamilekan — had expressed concern that SEC could go bankrupt.

A breakdown showed that SEC recorded about N8.9 billion deficit in the last three years — N2.9 billion in 2019; N4.3 billion in 2020; and N1.7 billion as of June 2021.