Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission chief says she ex pects to publish a KPMG stock exchange audit in just over six weeks, citing public demand after a 2008 crash and the firing of the bourse chief.

The SEC last month removed the head of the stock exchange and suspended its chairman and members of its governing council in what it said was a bid to restore investor confidence amid a raft of governance concerns.

A new management team is due to be appointed by the start of next year, a move that will allow the exchange to move forward to demutualisation and listing, part of a wider strategy of diversifying Nigeria’s bank-dominated stock market.

SEC Director-General Arunma Oteh said she believed widespread anger over the market collapse — together with press attention on former stock exchange head Ndi Okereke-Onyuike — meant there was little choice but to publish.

“I’m hoping I will get the interim report on Monday,” she told Reuters on Friday in an interview in London. “I hope we will complete the whole process in about six weeks. You have a high profile former director-general who believes she should not have been removed. You have a lot of people who have lost money. I haven’t made any public statements about making the report public but I almost think I have no choice.”

Investors had made it clear that improving the reputation of the exchange was crucial to the overall perception of Nigeria, she said. She said the new management would make a decision on the timetable for stock exchange demutualisation — something keenly awaited by investors — but she did not have a date.

Oteh — a former African Development Bank and Harvard MBA appointed this year — said she was also under pressure from new President Goodluck Jonathan to speed up diversification of the exchange, hoping to list oil firms and telecoms alongside banks.

Nigeria’s upstream oil producers are generally joint ventures between government, with a majority stake, and international oil firms such as Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

The aim would likely be to list part of the government-owned component on the stock exchange.
“I would love to see that happen next year,” she said, adding that the president would like to see it happen faster.

The SEC said in August it was taking 260 individuals and entities including banks and other capital markets operators to a special tribunal over alleged price-fixing, fraud and insider trading committed between 2006 and 2008.

Officials say they could have prosecuted a much larger group, but Oteh said the regulator had limited resources — and wanted to be sure of success in the cases they pursued.

“The key thing to do is to make people realise that the game has changed,” she said.
Nigeria’s reformers have long walked a rocky path. Anti-corruption chief Nuhu Ribadu, for example, widely praised by Western campaigners, was marginalised, fired and ultimately left the country in 2009.

Some say the current reform agenda is too dependent on a few key players — Oteh, central bank governor Lamido Sanusi and finance minister Olusegun Aganga.

“You need strong institutions and you also need people who are willing to be courageous and take risks,” Oteh said. “We have a team a people who are working together and reinforcing each other.

If one of us was to go, that would send a mixed signal. But at the same time some would say ‘these posts are effectively quasi political appointees, it happens’.”