The Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Lamido Yuguda has given a hint that the Commission will soon retire 152 top management staff as a way of reducing wage cost.
This was coming on the heels of the Senate open anger over the Commission’s spending of a total sum of N8 billion to service its staff out of the N9 billion it generates every year.
Appearing before the Senator Ibikunle Amosun-led Committee on Capital Market to defend the budget performance of the agency in 2021 and projections for 2022, Lamido Yuguda said: “In giving room for more financial inflow, we are planning to retire about 152 top management staff with fat salaries in paving way for recruitment of fresh workers with attendant less financial burdensome on the commission.
“There are measures at reducing expenditure and also measures at increasing revenue of the commission.”
During the meeting, the Senate sharply disagreed with SEC over spending of revenues made by the Commission largely on salaries and emoluments of staff.
The Chairman of the Committee, Senator Ibikunle Amosun who lampooned the Commission following the expenses made from its generated revenues, said: “your emolument was almost N6 billion out of the N9 billion and other expenses, so clearly you are spending almost all of the revenue that comes to you on staff emolument and other related things. “You should give us the number of staff that you have in the commission such that we need to look at what is happening. If you generate about N9 billion and almost N8 billion is purely for servicing the staff. You are having a huge deficit of almost N4 billion. When you continuously make this deficit, year in year out, then something is wrong.”
Earlier while the Senate, through its Committee on Capital Market felt it was wrong for SEC to have expended close to 90% of revenues made in the 2021 fiscal year on staff salaries and emoluments, SEC denied being frivolous on spending of revenues made.
Yuguda in his presentation said: ”a total of N11.5 billion was projected as revenue for 2021 out of which N2.689 billion was realised as at June with the hope of making more before the year runs out. Total recurrent expenditure for 2021 was budgeted at N13.53 billion but the actual expenditure was N4.063 by the end of June. Our budgeted deficit was N5.173 billion but the actual deficit as at end of September was N2.834 due to funding of it from our reserve . Though revenue performance is still weak but series of innovations like newly introduced charges for secondary Investors , will boost it up from 2022 fiscal year and beyond
