The West African Capital Markets Integration Programme, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Director General Lamido Yuguda, aims to create an environment that facilitates cross-border transactions in the sub-region. This was said by Yuguda during a meeting with Daniel Tetteh, the director general of SEC Ghana, in Accra.
According to Yuguda, the region’s great potential for cross-border capital market listings will likely lead to the development of a cooperative tool that would allow for efficient market policing.
This was said in a statement made available to The Guardian in Abuja yesterday and signed by SEC’s Head of Media, Efe Ebello. “Without the readiness of all parties involved, the program’s lofty goals may as well stay a dream,” he stated.
It also indicates, without a doubt, that this objective can only be successfully attained when all ECOWAS member nations join forces and actively commit to accomplishing the lofty goals of the strengthened collaborative structure that these types of accords involve.
“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 continued by stating that the long-standing ties between the two countries are strengthened by the fact that Ghana and Nigeria have the largest markets in the West African subregion. It is only foreseen that both nations take advantage of their respective uniqueness and size to look into potential 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 praised Yuguda and emphasized that Ghana and Nigeria might advance in ways that would result in the reciprocal benefits of leveraging the capital market. In order for the countries to advance and eventually create a single, large capital market, he continued, the region needed to open its markets to one another.
