The Executive Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in charge of operations, Mr. Mounir Gwarzo, on Monday took over the running of the capital market regulator as the Acting Director General following the exit of Ms Arunma Oteh.

Oteh completed her first tenure last week and was entitled to another term of five years but her appointment was not renewed by the federal government. She therefore handed over to Gwarzo as acting DG pending the appointment of a substantive DG for the commission.

Oteh described her five-year tenure as absolutely outstanding and thanked all staffs at SEC for the cooperation she enjoyed at helms of affairs.

She said: “When I joined SEC in January 2010, I was absolutely certain about why the SEC was important and what it’s role and what the agenda was. I was able to articulate it in one phrase “building a world class market.

“To have a vision and have everyone being able to connect and align around it for me whether it is capital market operators, whether its shareholders and other stakeholders for me, it is something that I find very rewarding. But I don’t think it would have been possible without each and every one of you accepting the challenge to try something in a different way or to do something in a way that you are not quite sure what will happen.”

She also stated that she had been able to lay the building blocks for a strong capital market and has built on it

 “Our aim is to build a meritocracy so that it is the good things that get funded, not necessarily the things that have connections so that we can also tackle some of what we are seeing in our world today, whether it is security challenges we face or the security challenges that everybody faces. My view is that one of the things that will address it is if people can feel that they are included, that they have economic access that they can create wealth, that the income inequalities that we see around us can be addressed. And I believe that the capital market is the answer and what we have done in the last five years is to lay a foundation; there is still a lot of work to be done” Oteh said.

She therefore appealed to the staff to continue to work hard and support the leadership to ensure that the brand that has been built is not taken away.