Unclaimed dividend by investors hit N190bn-SEC
By Motolani Oseni
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has stated that the unclaimed dividends in Nigeria’s capital market now stand at the region of N190 billion.
The director-general of SEC, Lamido Yuguda, disclosed this during the commission’s second Capital Market Committee (CMC) briefing held in Lagos via Zoom at the weekend.
The Capital Market Committee (CMC) was established to serve as a medium for the exchange of ideas among market stakeholders as well as for feedback to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on how to continuously improve market activities and regulation.
Yuguda linked the rising figure to irregularities in identity management and multiple subscriptions from investors.
He stated that, while the committee constituted by the SEC on identity management is working tirelessly to harmonise various databases of investors and facilitate data accuracy in the market, investors, on their part, have failed to claim their dividend.
According to him, the committee is expected to address the challenges of identity management and help tackle some of the issues of unclaimed dividends, direct cash settlement and multiple subscription.
To him, “the major issue causing rising unclaimed dividend is the owners not having access to them. As much as efforts are made by the regulators to ensure the figure is reduced, we keep putting efforts towards making sure that investors come forward and to claim their dividend and update their account.
“This would help reduce the figure and ensure that future dividend and benefits gets transmitted into the account quickly on a quarterly basis and every investor in the capital market is rightly accounted for to make our data base more robust and help us in planning.”
He restated commitment towards ensuring that the commission strengthens its infrastructure base, noting that, technology plays a major role in enabling the nation’s capital market attain its full potentials.
To this effect, he said, the SEC has concluded arrangement to roll out a technology infrastructure that would help strenghten its regulatory function in the capital market by the beginning of 2024.
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He reemphasised the need for government to prioritise the market as the most reliable medium to finance critical infrastructure, which already, is severally identified as the most challenging factor in doing business in the country.
Yuguda stated that the capital market provides variety of financing instruments that would help to facilitate their respective infrastructure projects.
“We need to harness the capital market to fund critical infrastructure that will stand the test of time and prepare Nigeria for the kind of population being forecasted for the country. We are likely to have a surge in our population in the next 30 years.
“We need to make necessary investment in infrastructure so that Nigeria will be prepared to confront this demography so that the youth will also capitalise on this to remain in the country and the capital market is well positioned to play a role in this developmental match,” he said.
