Skip to content
Djeli.

Unclaimed dividends

Unclaimed dividends in Nigeria

If you ever held shares in a Nigerian company and did not register your bank account for e-dividends, payments may be waiting for you with the company's registrar. This is how to check, using the SEC's own search, and how to claim.

₦215 billion was unclaimed, according to the SEC's Director-General speaking after the Capital Market Committee meeting. Higher figures circulate in the press; this is the one we could trace to the regulator. (as at March 2024)

How to check and claim

official channels only
  1. Search the SEC's Non-Mandated Dividends Search ↗ by first name and surname. It needs no account. It tells you which registrar holds your account and gives you their mandate form. It does not tell you an amount.
  2. Contact that registrar — its page below has the official site and the contact details it publishes — and fill its e-dividend mandate form, which links your bank account to your shareholding.
  3. Submit the form through your bank or the registrar, as the SEC's guidance says. Several registrars also accept mandates through NIBSS's e-dividend mandate service ↗. Submitting the mandate is what starts the payments coming to you directly.
  4. If a registrar says your dividends are too old, the SEC's circular of 5 June 2025 directs companies to keep honouring claims: cite it by name and date.

check The SEC has warned publicly that only sec.gov.ng and the NIBSS portal are genuine e-dividend sites. Several third-party "unclaimed dividend checkers" appear in search results; we do not link them, and neither should you trust them with your details. Nobody needs to charge you a percentage to run a search that is open to anyone.

Who holds the money

It is held by your company's registrar — not the SEC, and not the company itself. The Finance Act 2020 was meant to move six-year-old dividends into a federal Unclaimed Funds Trust Fund, but as at the SEC's circular of 5 June 2025 that fund is still not operational, and the SEC has directed companies and registrars to keep honouring claims in the meantime.

deadline Do not assume you are too late. A 12-year statute bar is widely quoted, but the SEC's circular of 5 June 2025 directs companies to stop treating older dividends as barred and to keep paying claims. If a registrar refuses you on those grounds, cite that circular by name and date.

There is no account-dormancy rule here. The trap is an un-mandated account: if you never filed an e-dividend mandate, warrants were posted to whatever address the registrar had, and they simply pile up.

Registrars

11 with a page here

Not every registrar is here. The SEC's register of licensed operators ↗ lists them all — check any firm there before giving it your details. Contact details on these pages were read from each registrar's own website on 30 Sept 2026.

Sources:FAQs on the unclaimed dividends retrieval process (SEC Nigeria) ↗Circular on the treatment of unclaimed dividends, 5 June 2025 (SEC Nigeria) ↗SEC vows to address ₦215bn unclaimed dividends (The Punch) ↗

Djeli holds none of this: no names, no holdings, nothing to search. Other markets are on the unclaimed dividends page; dividends Nigerian companies are paying now are on NGX dividends.