Pulling Nigeria out of recession requires an unusual solution – Dr. Ofo, ICSAN president
Dr. Nath Ofo is president of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators of Nigeria (ICSAN), which this month is celebrating its 50th anniversary. In this interview with Dr. Ofo speaks on ICSAN’s inevitability in corporate governance and its
At 50, it doesn’t seem as if ICSAN has been as visible and prominent as its fellow chartered bodies in Nigeria, like ICAN, NIM and CIBN. So what has held ICSAN back?
That is one good question that will throw light on the rich pedigree of ICSAN. At 50, we have come a long way, when you take into account how it started. The Nigeria ICSAN started as an outpost for the United Kingdom body, the ICSA(Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, UK.), which was the body that actually gave birth to ICSA Nigeria.
They were so popular and needed to conduct their exams in Nigeria so they neededICSAN to help them handle their examinations in Nigeria, and that was what we were doing. We would help them conduct their examinations in Nigeria and then pass the scripts back to them. They would assess and then send the results back to Nigeria for those who had written those exams.
That practice continued till 2011 when we began to domesticate the exams. Students here now write the local exams and no longer the UK exams. The reason for domesticating the exams was that Nigerians who were writing the ICSA UK exams were writing them to work in Nigeria and not in the UK. When I wrote the exams in Nigeria, I was already working with the Nigerian Breweries. The content of the UK exam was not entirely domestic for us. The content was papers like UK Company Law, UK company tax, etc., things that were not really in line with what we have in Nigeria.
After we domesticated the exams, we had to remodel the syllabus to suit the Nigerian environment, so we started assessing our students based on content like the Nigerian Company Law, Nigerian company tax laws, etc. Students who write the exams are prepared for practice in the Nigerian environment and Nigerian job market.
That was the major shift, from being just an examination agent to being an examination conducting body. Since that 2011, we have ensuredthere has been no compromise in standard and quality, and there has been nothing like exam leakage.
Many Nigerians can easily say what chartered bodies like the ICAN, NIPR, NIM and CIBN do, but can they of ICSAN?
Our main focus is corporate governance, and corporate governance, in a nutshell, is doing the right thing at the right time to drive the desired results. We’ve identified five Nigerians as champions of good corporate governance that we will be according our Fellowship during our anniversary this month. They included the chairman of First Bank of Nigeria, Mrs. Ibukun Awosika; founder of Channels Television, John Momoh; and chairman of MTN and Diamond Bank, Mr. Pascal Dozie.Wewant tosend home the message that people are watching you in your corporate governance.
We’ve come a long way, and a solid proof will be when we complete our ICSAN Tower, a 15-storey edifice to signal the huge expansion that is taking place at ICSAN. The body is completely reengineered. We plan to have offshore centres, starting in Ghana as a pilot. There are many Nigerians schooling in Ghana; they went to school in Ghana not because they want to work in Ghana after schooling, or they want to be Ghanaians. After school, they will come back home. So what we are doing is to prepare them in Ghana for the challenges they would meet when they return home, in terms of corporate governance and other intellectual challenges.
We are also planning to talk to the ICSA UK to start helping us to conduct our ICSAN exams in the UK. There are a lot of Nigerians in the UK, and many of them want to come back home to work. We want to prepare them so that when they come back to Nigeria,we will be arming them with a professional qualification they can use in Nigeria. I remember when he was first elected and sworn in, people started behaving well, people were afraid to collect bribes, it appeared people were ready to stop their bad habits. Many called the effect the Buhari body language. But everything has dropped back to normal. Corruption is back. Drive from here to Ondo, or to anywhere, and you will see the extent of corruption those who are supposed to be law enforcement officers brazenly perpetrate. Impunity is back Daily Trust on Sunday,
How would you say the ICSAN contribution has impacted on,not just corporate governance, but the Nigerian national economy generally?
I will start by saying that if you have limited resources and you manage themvery well, you can get a lot from those limited resources. As chartered secretaries, we are trained to be compliance officers. In companies where there are ICSAN members, trained, of course, they ensure the right things are done at the right time to prevent wastages. Organisations are saved from avoidable lapses that may lead to, for instance, paying heavy penalties, which affects organisational growth.
In every serious organisation, company secretaries are high officers in every organisation. A company secretary advises the board and guide directors in their decision-taking processes. By so doing, they add value to decisiontaking in the boardroom to ensure that companies are led in the right direction, otherwise, if a company doesn’t have such a professional in the room, company directors might take a decision, only to find out it is against the law. Such a silly mistake might lead to the collapse of a company. So if directors listen to their company secretaries, they will not fall foul of the law and the company progresses. The bigger effect is that when companies progress, the national economy progresses.When directors don’t listen to their company secretaries who are trained to detect danger signals, they face the music.
To what extent does ICSAN participate in the Economic Summit, as a contribution to policy formulation for the national economy?
We do advocacy. We touch on governing and governance, we put up papers, we interact with leaders of bodies like the Corporate Affairs Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. There are some new collaborations we are conceptualising, which have not materialised yet, but hopefully will soon. We run seminars and workshops with international bodies. This year, we had done with the International Finance Corporation, and we also had a corporate governance workshop with the business arm of Delloite, an international management consultancy and services firm.
The economy is in a recession. What do you think President Buhari should do to address the problem fast?
My solution to Nigeria’s economic problems is unusual. People are proffering all manners of solution, but I believe the real problem we have in Nigeria, which is also what had brought us into this recession, iscorruption. Nothing else. Here is a country that is richly blessed with abundant resources, human and material, but unfortunately, the common wealth is not going round. Some individuals are just cornering what is everybody’s wealth and stockpiling somewhere and, in many cases, even taking it out of the country to boost the economies of other lands. Government must stop all of this nonsense, which was what has gotten us into recession. We must begin to deal with corrupt persons; government must do speedy trial of corrupt people and not allowing a case to linger for 20 years. Corruption must be fought to a standstill.
But with the kind of judiciary we have, how do you think government can achieve the kind of trials you spoke about?
If the judiciary is the problem, if it’s the bottleneck hampering the fight against corruption, then government should deal with the judiciary. After all, some judges, in recent times, had been sanctioned. But that wasn’t enough, because the rot in the judiciary is too deep. Many people believe the fight against corruption is a witch-hunt and government is not serious about fighting it.
When the leadership sets the right tone, everybody will comply and everything will fall into place. When the President was campaigning on the platform of change, a lot of Nigerians bought into his agenda not somewhat because it is APC but because it is him, his discipline and his no-nonsense pedigree. So many believed if he is the leader, he would stop the impunity and the corrupt practices that were going on.
I remember when he was first elected and sworn in, people started behaving well, people were afraid to collect bribes, it appeared people were ready to stop their bad habits. Many called the effect the Buhari body language. But everything has dropped back to normal. Corruption is back. Drive from here to Ondo, or to anywhere, and you will see the extent of corruption those who are supposed to be law enforcement officers brazenly perpetrate. Impunity is back.
So what I am saying is that we are in a recession because things are still not being done the right way. People do the wrong things not because they don’t know the right things to do but because they are not being punished for it. It is only punishment than will deter people from doing the wrong things. In Nigeria, people even brag, “I’ll do it (something wrong) and nothing will happen.”And truly, nothing will happen. Abroad, if you commit an offence, you are sure to go to jail, no matter who you are, even for small offences like wrong parking. In our own case, once you are any form of leader, you are untouchable. If we start realising that if you do the crime, you must do the time, we will start doing the right thing.