By Peter Egwuatu

LAGOS — The immediate past Director General, D-G, of Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, Ms. Arunma Oteh, yesterday handed over the leadership of the commission to Mr. Mounir Gwarzo as the acting D-G.

Mr. Gwarzo is erstwhile Executive Commissioner, Operations in the commission.

Speaking during the formal handover ceremony in the commission’s headquarters in Abuja, Oteh described her five year tenure at the commission as absolutely outstanding attributing it to the co-operation she received from every member of staff.

She said: “When I joined SEC in January 2010, I was absolutely certain about why the SEC was important and what its 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 everyone 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 said what the commission had been able to achieve in summary was to lay a foundation for the nation to see a capital market that will help tackle its infrastructure challenges that will help people who are setting up businesses, who own businesses raise millions of naira in capital.

“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.”

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

The Acting DG, Gwarzo was born 50 years ago in Kano and attended Bayero University, Kano and graduated with a Bachelors degree in Economics in 1987.