Stakeholders in the capital market on Tuesday poured encomium on the outgoing Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Exchange Group, Oscar Onyema, at a pull-out ceremony held in his honour at the NGX office in Lagos on Tuesday. The event marked the end of Onyema’s 13-year tenure at the exchange.
Onyema was appointed CEO of The Exchange in 2011 and led the exchange through the demutualisation process. He oversaw the listing of the Nigerian Exchange Group on the operating exchange of the group afterwards. He was succeeded by Temi Popoola, who was the former CEO of the Nigerian Exchange Limited.
The Chairman of the NGX Group, Umaru Kwairanga, stated thus:
“Oscar Onyema’s achievements during the NSE era were nothing short of monumental. Onyema overhauled the technological backbone by developing and transforming our trading platform, bringing it into the modern era, working with management and staff to design a robust business continuity plan that saw the exchange seamlessly maintain remote trading for over two years in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“He implemented a world-class regulatory regime focused on fairness, stability, collaborative rule-making and robust corporate standards. This steadfast commitment to regulation and transparency restored our investors’ confidence and positioned the exchange as a credible and trusted platform.”
President of the Chartered Institute of Stockbrokers, Oluwole Adeosun, stated thus:
Onyema came in from the United States of America, where he had garnered capital market experience and immediately brought that experience to bear in setting a clear and firm path for the recovery of the stock market through wholesome restructuring and revisioning of the only active securities exchange that the country had at that time.
“Between 2011 and March 2024 is 13 years and incredibly today, very few people remember or can ever remember that this same market was in that gloomy state as most of the global capital markets were back then. The symbolism is further accentuated by the fact that the great market boom experienced between 2006 and 2007 was recently replicated in 2022 and 2023, even stretching into the first quarter of 2024”.