Nigeria has an important job ahead: identity management. And that management is not just to know who is who before a bank account is opened. There is something even more critical: preventing people from using fake names and pseudonyms to buy financial products.
During the “golden years” before the Great Recession, banks were hitting initial public offers which were typically oversubscribed. For some people to capture more units, they engineered their names to get different allocations.
Unfortunately, some of those men and women have died – and magically, no one could trace their families! That is partly why Nigeria has close to N170 billion (about $410 million) unclaimed dividends.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed that unclaimed dividends in the Nigerian Capital Markets rose to N170 billion as at December 2020.
This was disclosed by Director-General, SEC, Mr Lamido Yuguda, at the second post-Capital Market Committee (CMC) virtual news conference, on Friday. He added that the figure rose from N158.44 billion total unclaimed dividends as of December 2019, citing issues related to poor identity management.
It is a hard thing preventing people from doing crazy things! But I blame our primary and secondary education. Like I wrote the other day, in primary 4, some US primary schools are already introducing property rights to kids. In Nigeria, we do not care.
Do not get me wrong, we score many own-goals in the nation and some of these things have nothing to do with governments! Avoiding those own-goals may be the beginning of a national rebirth, economically.
Nonetheless, the government should not take over the dividends. Rather, this money should be invested since it came through those who have investing spirits. We can distribute the dividends to help support the companies of the future while making sure there is liquidity in case relations and families of the investors show up!
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Don’t be surprised that some have forgotten where they own shares, while some are simply bored, and do not care about these things, only few must have died actually…
For all the money we invested in education, we still failed to educate people well, rather we mass produce largely ignorant and low information public.
People bought shares because they heard that it was the talk of the town, not that they really understood what they were doing, so when the hype died, they simply moved on and forgot everything.
Humans can surprise you anytime, nothing is too ridiculous for creatures roaming the face of the earth.
Does Nigeria even have comprehensive catalogue of all its assets? And we are talking about everyday people here.