Gwarzo takes over from Oteh at SEC

Mounir H. Gwarzo, erstwhile executive commissioner, operations, at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has taken over from Arunma Oteh, outgoing director general of the commission as the acting director general.
This was announced by Oteh at a formal handover ceremony at the commission’s headquarters in Abuja, on Monday.
Oteh, while handing over to Gwarzo, described her five-year tenure at the commission as absolutely outstanding, attributing it to the cooperation 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 it’s 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 every one 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 that what the commission has been able to achieve in summary is 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. “My view is that one of the things that will address it is if people can feel that they are included, that they have economic access that they can create wealth, that the income inequalities that we see around us can be addressed. And I believe that the capital market is the answer and what we have done in the last five years is to lay a foundation; there is still a lot of work to be done” Oteh said.
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. In 1991, he proceeded to the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom where he obtained a post graduate degree in Development Finance. Gwarzo is an Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Stock Brokers, in 2005 became a Fellow of the Institute.
He has acted in Nigerian capital market as an operator and a regulator. This is evident from the caliber of institutions he has served during his working career that spans a period of twenty-five years. The institutions include Ministry of Trade, Kano State; the Nigerian Stock Exchange, Century Merchant Bank Limited, Empire Securities Limited, The Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria and MTL Global Investment Limited.
Gwarzo has been a participant at several courses both home and abroad some of which are The Securities Market Regulation which is the leading training programme in securities regulation in the world by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Development of Bonds Markets in Johannesburg, South Africa; Assets Backed Securities and Mortgage Securitisation in Singapore; Operational and Credit Risk Management in Dubai, and Advanced Management Programmes (AMPS) at INSEAD (The Premier Management Institute in Europe), Paris as well as at SAID Business School Templeton College, University of Oxford, UK.
He is happily married and widely traveled.