April 17, 2012/ Securities & Exchange Commission Press Release
 

On March 5, 2010, Ms. Arunma Oteh spoke with the Financial Times (FT) of London. That was her maiden interview with a foreign media organization in her new role as the Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Nigeria. Only two months on the job, her message was clear: “my vision is a market that is stable, that is efficient, one that helps Nigeria fund its huge needs, one that is considered world class by any investor, local or international.” Determined to attain that set objective, Ms Oteh quickly identified a major drawback of the market at the time: weak capacity “at the level of regulators, capacity of capital market operators, and capacity at the level of the ordinary investor.”
 

Delivering on her promise to boost the regulator’s capacity, the SEC in December 2011 took delivery of 52 brand new young professionals. Twenty-one young women and thirty-one young men, many of them with a few years of private sector experience under their belt, will add the much-needed vigour and unprecedented sparkle to the work of the Commission. More important, they bring specialist knowledge too. Fifteen lawyers, twelve individuals with economics degrees, fifteen holders of finance and accounting degrees, and ten graduates of computer science and mathematics, including many holders of master level degrees and advanced professional certification – these new employees were selected through a very rigorous, merit-based and purpose-driven process.
 

“When you hear of recruitment in Nigeria, you think of ‘who-knows-who’ but I just decided to give this one a shot. I was shocked that the entire process was so transparent. None of my colleagues came in here because of whom they knew,” Robert Onyegbula, one of the young professionals, testified at the SEC’s 2011 end of year gathering. All the other YPs share Robert’s testimony {View opinion blog}.  Ms Oteh points out that the idea was to attract the very best from the pool of Nigerian graduates who applied as part of the recruitment exercise advertised in December 2010. That explains why the SEC in October that year hired a reputable consultancy firm to midwife the process.
 

Following due process, the Commission published in major national dailies that it was hiring Nigerian graduates under its Young Professionals Programme (YPP). A total of 34,292 graduates applied through the prescribed online portal. Out of that number, 2,283 candidates were accredited for aptitude tests conducted in February and May 2011. Only 219 candidates emerged from that stage, 21 of whom were screened out because they studied subjects that didn’t match the hiring objective. Thus began the journey of 198 candidates to the Assessment Center (AC), a simulated environment for discerning the candidates’ problem solving capability, sense of group dynamics, interpersonal and communicative skills, ability to self-start and so on.
 

To ensure total fairness in line with civil service rules, without sacrificing merit, the best three candidates from ten states not represented among the 198 also joined the AC. The 52 finalists who form the inaugural set of the SEC’s YPs emerged from the two Assessment Centers in Lagos and Abuja. And this “brings to successful closure a most rigorous recruitment drive,” says Mr. Dauda Husseini, head HR at the SEC.
 

Each of the new intakes who have since assumed duties has been absorbed into one of the Commission’s four directorates – Director General’s office, Operations, Legal and Enforcement, and Finance and Administration. They passed through an onerous induction process, which included a three-week drilling by a reputable UK training institute at the Commission’s Abuja office, a three-week long boot camp at the Central Bank’s training academy in Lagos, internship with market operators and experts, and ICT training. The YPs will be given an opportunity to work in different divisions within the Commission, their assignments reflective of their academic disciplines, professional experience and demonstrated aptitudes gleaned from the assessment.
 

The YPP is only an aspect of the capacity-building revolution initiated by Ms Arunma Oteh in Nigeria’s capital market. Last July, the Commission collaborated with the United States SEC to organize a 5-day training program for capital market operators and financial regulators, in Abuja and Lagos. That complemented a garden variety of investor education initiatives including the monthly ”Eye on the Capital Market” on CNBC Africa, an SEC-sponsored Nollywood movie “Breeze,” regional outreach programs, an investment forum, as well as sessions co-sponsored by the SEC on secured and structured finance.
 

The Commission has similarly stepped up training programs for existing staff, who have now been joined by the recently recruited young professionals. The recruitment of such “exceptional YPs,” says Ms. Oteh, “forms a vital part of our often stated drive, namely, repositioning the Commission to be more responsive to the dual mandate of regulating and developing Nigeria’s capital markets to world class standards.”
 

Source: SEC  Nigeria