The Director-General of Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Nigeria, Dr. Emomotimi Agama, at the weekend called for more collaboration from all financial system stakeholders amid its ongoing regulatory drive aimed at fully exploring the potential of the investment space for sustainable development of the country.
He assured that recent reforms initiated by the commission to transform the capital market were achieving desired results but require a collective push to help position Nigeria as a leading investment landscape in the global space.
In a keynote address at the Emerging Africa Capital Limited Investor Summit & Awards event with the theme “Deploying and Mobilizing Capital and Investment Strategies in a Shifting Global Economy,” Agama highlighted the implications of the current macroeconomic uncertainties in the global economic order for all economies globally.
For Agama, while some countries remained the choice of many investors now due to quick returns opportunities, in the long run countries like Nigeria offer longer benefits in view of their huge opportunities waiting to be fully explored.
Already, he continued, Nigeria’s capital market has demonstrated considerable resilience in the face of the headwinds as the regulatory reforms, including the introduction of electronic offerings, deepening of the bond market, expansion of alternative investment platforms, and the commission’s engagement with sustainable finance principles which have started to bear fruit by attracting renewed investor interest, indicative of a market in active evolution.
Despite the feats, the Director-General admitted that the full potential of what the capital market can do for Nigeria’s economic development is not yet fully unlocked, given that market capitalization relative to GDP remains below the benchmarks of its peer economies. This is made worse by the retail investor participation that is too thin, while the derivatives market is still at its nascent stage.
To translate the potential to real gains for investors and the nation’s economy, Agama urged collective responsibility since the capital market cannot be single-handedly built by regulators, exchanges or by investors alone.
Strength, he stressed, lies in stakeholders playing their roles with integrity, competence, and long-term orientation, just as he advised domestic corporate issuers to embrace the capital market as their primary pathway to financing growth by improving governance, sharpening disclosure, and building investor relations capabilities that attract institutional capital.
“The market rewards quality, and the companies that invest in quality today will access capital on terms that compound their competitive advantage,” the SEC boss further added.
He challenged domestic institutional investors, particularly pension fund administrators and insurance companies to deepen their engagement with the nation’s capital market instruments through active participation in the price discovery process, besides developing the analytical capacity to invest confidently across asset classes and geographies as Nigeria’s savings pool is a resource of enormous strategic significance.
Similarly, the SEC boss assured foreign investors and development finance institutions that Nigeria remains open for investments as the commission continues to create a principles-based regulatory environment that is transparent and aligned with international best practices.
The Director-General also appealed to his colleagues in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Debt Management Office(DMO), National Insurance Commission (NAICOM), the Pension Commission (PenCom), and other relevant agencies to continue to deepen inter-agency collaboration, harmonize policies, and present a unified, investor-friendly face to the world as the sophistication of the nation’s capital market depends on the coherence of their regulatory frameworks.
On the promise of capital deployed with purpose, Agama said: “The history of economic development is, at its core, the history of how societies have organized the deployment of capital. The nations and peoples that have built great economies have done so not simply because they were endowed with resources, but because they developed the institutions, the instruments, and the discipline to channel those resources toward their highest and most productive uses.
“Nigeria stands at an inflection point. The global economy is shifting in ways that create both significant risks and significant opportunities for an emerging market of our scale and potential. The decisions we make — individually as investors and collectively as a financial community — in the next three to five years will determine whether we capture the upside of this moment or allow it to pass us by”, he stressed further.
