Why we should encourage West African market integration, by SEC DG

The Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Lamido Yuguda, has said the West African capital markets integration programme is aimed at creating an enabling environment for cross-border transactions in the sub-region. Yuguda stated this at a meeting with the Director General of SEC Ghana, Daniel Tetteh, in Accra.

According to Yuguda, the enormous potential of cross-border listings of capital markets in the region is expected to develop a tool of cooperation to enable effective policing of respective markets.

This was contained in a statement, yesterday signed by the Head of Media., SEC, Efe Ebello and made available to The Guardian in Abuja. He said: “Without the readiness of all concerned, the lofty aims of the programme may as well remain a dream. It goes to say, unequivocally, that this goal can only be achieved seamlessly when all member states of the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) come on board and actively commit to achieving the noble objectives of the enhanced collaborative structure that these nature of agreements entail.

“On this note, SEC Ghana and SEC Nigeria are desirous of achieving these ideals and have taken the lead in driving this project in the sub-region while hopefully aiming to, someday, expand their coverage beyond the sub-regional frontiers onto other parts of the continent.”

The SEC DG further explained that the enduring relationship between the two jurisdictions is more amplified by the fact that Ghana and Nigeria have the largest markets in the West African sub-region and it will only be foresighted that both countries seize the advantage of size and peculiarities, and explore viable areas of cooperation.

“We need to come closer and take deliberate steps to achieve bilateral cooperation. We are very keen on this relationship.
There is a strong relationship between us; so we need to continue to nurture and grow it and create institutions that will help our people have better living standards. I hope we can achieve a lot by bringing our capital markets together. We need to make our institutions stronger as well as our economic activities,” he said.

Tetteh commended Yuguda, stressing that Ghana and Nigeria could push forward in ways that would bring about the mutual benefits of leveraging the capital market. He added that the region needs to open their markets to each other so that the countries could achieve more and then attain one big capital market.