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Tag: openness

  • Bid accountability: Stakeholders hail openness, transparency

    Bid accountability: Stakeholders hail openness, transparency

    Ogun-Oshun River Basin Development Authority (OORBDA) Managing Director, Dr. Adedeji Ashiru, has reaffirmed his commitment to transparency and integrity in handling projects appropriation.

    He  emphasised transparency and integrity would be guiding principles of the authority.

    Ashiru spoke during the bid opening for 2024 appropriation at the authority’s headquarters in Abeokuta, Ogun State, noting a Technical Committee on 2024 Projects Implementation and Delivery as well as Evaluation Committee have been established to ensure due process and transparency.

    He noted the authority’s focus for the appropriation include surface water harnessing, groundwater development, irrigation scheme development, hydro-meteorological data collection, erosion and flood control, agricultural infrastructure supply, and farm and rural access road construction and rehabilitation.

    Ashiru stressed these goals were achievable through preparation, implementation of procurement plans, and consideration of needs assessment and budget provisions.

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    Demonstrating his commitment to transparency and integrity, companies were disqualified due to irregularities during the bids.

    Danforth Edobor of Justice, Development, and Peace Mission commended the authority for its transparency and congratulated Ashiru on his appointment.

    He said the authority’s transparency and openness would impact citizens.

    Eighty four lots were advertised, with 82 opened at the earlier Technical bids opening in April and 363 financial bids from qualified companies opened.

    The financial bids opening was witnessed by executive directors, directors, management team, representatives from Federal Ministry of Water Resources and Sanitation, NGOs, and other stakeholders.

  • Accountants calls for openness to new technology

    A Senior Fellow on Information Systems at the Lagos Business School and Digital Financial Services Specialist, Dr. Yinka David-West, has advised Nigerians to be open to new technology that is rapidly growing in the world.

    Technology, according to her, can reduce unemployment in not-too distant future. Speaking at the Empowerment Summit 2018 of the Professional Accountants’ Christian Ministry (PACM) at its headquarters in Yaba, Lagos, she said, “Accountants should be proactive, learning new technology in order to meet up with the fast growing technology in the world. And while doing research, you should be more concerned about Cyber security, which is very important.”

    Speaking on ‘Technological disruption and the future of Accounting Profession’, she said the one-day programme was to afford the attendees the opportunity to learn, review, correct, remediate and put controls in place.

    In his presentation, a Partner and West Africa Tax Leader (PwC), Mr. Taiwo Oyedele, gave insights into understanding the effect of the recently introduced transfer pricing regime and the impact on businesses.

    He explained that only extremely decent Nigerians pay their taxes and challenged politicians to pay taxes and show proof of payment so as to be great examples to their followers.

    In his closing remarks, the president, Professional Accountants’ Christian Ministry, (PACM), Pastor Shola Adegbenro thanked the speakers for making the summit a success.

  • LCCI: why we’re partnering INEC on transparency, openness

    The Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) is partnering with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to set a framework for transparency, openness and level playing field for all economic players because the political environment has a profound impact on the investment environment and business performance.

    LCCI President Mr. Babatunde Ruwase said as business people, members of the Organised Private Sector (OPS) cannot operate outside the political space. “We, therefore, cannot be spectators in the democratic and electoral process,” he stated.

    Ruwase, who spoke at an INEC private sector forum, organised by the LCCI in Lagos, noted that many private sector players have a negative perception of politics which informed the adverse disposition of many of them to politics.

    He noted that the quality of political governance has implications for the sustainability and prosperity of businesses, and politicians determine the quality of economic policies.

    “It is the politicians that determine the quality of institutions; it is the politicians that determine the quality of investment policies and appropriate the resources of the state. Invariably the destiny of the people is in the hands of the political class,” Ruwase said.

    This, he said, was why LCCI was seeking political governance that sets a framework for transparency, openness and level playing field for all economic players, as well as an economy that rewards entrepreneurship and enterprise.

    He added that the Chamber also seeks an economy where there is a relationship between wealth creation and economic prosperity; and an economy where the policy formulation process is transparent, inclusive and in the overall national economic interest.

    The INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, said as part of entrenching the culture of transparency, openness and level playing field, the Commission’s ongoing Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) will have a register of over 80 million voters in 2019.

    He said since April 2017 when the CVR exercise started, some 9,700,999 new voters have been registered as at 14th June 2018, adding that if they add this to the current register of 69,720,350 voters, they will have a register of over 80 million voters in 2019.

    Yakubu said in an effort to promote certainty of electoral process, the Commission broke with tradition by establishing the principle that going forward national elections in Nigeria should hold on the third Saturday of the month of February of the election year (Presidential and National Assembly), followed two weeks later by  state elections (Governor and state Assembly).

    According to him, it was on this principle that the commission took the decision that the 2019 general elections will hold on the dates referred to earlier. Accordingly, and for the first time in their history, the Commission released the timetable and schedule of activities for the 2019 general elections on 9th January 2018, over a year in advance.

    “Just like elections proper, election dates in Nigeria are also no longer a matter of guess work. We believe that doing so will engender certainty and give sufficient time to political parties, civil society organisations, the media, security agencies and the business community to plan.

     

  • Wanted: More openness in NBA’s affairs

    Wanted: More openness in NBA’s affairs

    Paul Usoro (SAN) is a leading communications lawyer with over 30 years’ experience. A member of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Legal Profession Regulation Review Committee, he became a SAN in 2003. Usoro handled over 35 lawsuits arising from the 2015 election. In this interview with reporters in Lagos, he speaks on the NBA, judicial corruption, how to improve young lawyers’ welfare and sundry issues. JOSEPH JIBUEZE was there.

    On Bar, media relationship

    The role of the media is to inform the public and disseminate information. The Bar acts as a watchdog of the society. How can the watchdog get heard if the disseminator is not there? It’s important that there should be a close relationship between the Bar and the media because they have critical roles to play as far as shaping policies are involved. They need to have a constant handshake for the betterment of society.

    On NBA’s perceived lethargy on national issues

    I believe the NBA is playing its role. There are different ways it can do it. One is by having regular media briefings on what needs to be changed. Where they notice something should be changed about the judiciary, and they have access to the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), they can channel their issues, meet with him and facilitate the change. They can do that without coming out to the public. So, it depends on the nature of what they want to influence. In some instances, it’s important that you make noise and let people know that there are certain things that should be changed.

    In certain instances, it makes sense to facilitate change through discreet discussions or to be the change agent. In terms of procedure, it’s not a one-size fits all. It depends on what they want to address. Of course, the NBA president has discretion on what method he should use to address a specific challenge. I believe they’re doing things; maybe not all of them come out in the public. Maybe they could do more with a re-tweaking of the information machinery. But I know they’re doing things. There’s usually a quarterly NBA NEC meeting, and they give reports. Only a part of those things are ventilated to the press.

    On his management style

    I operate an open-house, open-door policy that allows people to know what we’re doing and what we want to achieve. My firm is one of the extremely few where everyone knows exactly how much comes in and what we make at the end of each year. Every week we have a finance meeting.  A lot of principals don’t allow others in their firms to have insight into how money is made. We’re rather open and allow our lawyers to have access to where the money comes from. For example, we handle major matters for a leading manufacturer. I have regular meeting with the principal and I attend those meeting with my colleagues. There were instances where I delegated and my juniors had meetings with the principal without me. The applies to other clients we work for. There are not many principals who have that confidence. They get concerned that the fellow will leave the organisation and take over the client.

    On whether NBA should run an open-door policy

    I actually think there should be that type of policy for an association like the NBA, even much more than a law firm. I adopted it in my firm because I consciously put in place a succession planning structure. I don’t have exclusive knowledge of what is happening. So, I can delegate. In the case of the NBA, it’s more like a mini-Nigeria. When you’re there as an elected official, you’re holding that office in trust for the members. The rainmakers are the members. It is really their funds that run the association. That’s the more reason there has to be that level of openness and interaction, and members have to understand exactly what you’re doing, because it is their association. That is why it is the Nigerian Bar Association, not an individual’s.

    On giving gifts to judges

    There’s a statutory definition of what a bribe is. It’s not a matter of perception. There are ingredients that show what a bribe is. So, merely giving money to somebody does not amount to bribe. It does not at all. In having to prove whether the giving of money from X to Y was bribery, you have to test it based on the ingredients that the law stipulates and then say this amounts to bribe. We’re in Nigeria where in some sense we’re our brothers’ keepers. There are instances where the business of giving money to X or Y would purely be that one is simply giving money as a brother’s keeper and it has absolutely nothing to do with judicial corruption. Such gift does not engender any form of judicial corruption.

    On the distinction between gift and inducement

    There has to be a distinction between those types of instances and where there is judicial corruption in the sense of giving money to someone as an inducement for having to do something. That is totally and outrightly bad. But there has to be that distinction. Sometimes what we do in Nigeria is that we generally malign without making that distinction.

    On how he views judicial corruption

    Judicial corruption is bad, howsoever you look at it. But then, it needs to be proved because perception is not necessarily correct. The fact that you shout or it is written in the media doesn’t mean that the thing has happened. Perception is not always right. I have experienced it and in the process you lose a lot of good people simply because you destroyed them out of a misperception.

    On special courts

    My understanding of what the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) directed is to have dedicated courts to attend to only corruption cases. Why not? This is similar to having specialised courts to fast track the processes. For me, it’s a good idea.  On their not been set up yet, I don’t know what the challenges are. It is also possible that judges have been designated. In Lagos for example, there’s a new Chief Judge, who has just done a reshuffle of the judges. I’m fairly certain the CJN’s directive will be implemented.

    On NBA’s role in judges’ appointment

    Those members of the NBA who are appointed to the NJC should make sure that they review those processes and make ensure they are sufficiently stringent. It’s critical. The second critical thing is the enforcement of those processes. Sometimes you may have them very well written, but there may be loopholes in enforcing them. So, you want to make sure that those loopholes are blocked, either with the process itself, or with implementation. I think that will help. That is why there is need for a constant revision.

    On poor salaries for young lawyers

    It’s a source of concern. It’s a critical issue. We hear reports of young lawyers being paid N30,000 a month. As a take-home pay, it doesn’t take you home. When you don’t have a satisfied workforce, the quality of work is impacted, as well as the person’s welfare, and it has a multiplier effect. One thing that can be done is for the leading lights of the NBA to show by example that they care about the welfare of the juniors. Then it becomes easy to persuade others to follow.

    If for example, it becomes clear to people that the President of the Bar association employs and pays juniors well, it is easy for him to use the moral authority to persuade the other senior lawyers to pay young lawyers well. It’s just like Nigeria. You may have all the laws, but if leaders don’t lead by example, the law is just as good as what is written. Mentorship is very important. That’s why the transparency we operate in my office  is important. They know when money comes in and they’ve not had the experience of their salaries or allowances not being paid on time. If they grow and they have a stake in the firm, you have solved the problem of succession, and you have taken care of welfare. And you show those who grow to become partners that they should treat those coming behind the same way.

    On PUC pro-bono challenge

    The concept of pro-bono means you’re doing certain things free for society’s benefit. The person doing pro-bono work is not getting financial reward. So, we set up the challenge. The person who wins gets an X amount, which is a motivation. It might not necessarily compensate that person for the efforts in the pro-bono service. But it acts as an encouragement, knowing that someone appreciates what you have done. We want to cultivate it even among the young ones. We believe we should encourage them. The focus of the pro-bono challenge is for young lawyers. We’ll do it quite often. The firm (PUC) has also sponsored the Lawyers’ Table Tennis Open (Mfon Usoro Cup) competition for almost 10 years. People win financial awards from it. We’re hoping it’ll also continue for a long time.

  • Enemies of quest for openness, governance reforms

    Enemies of quest for openness, governance reforms

    Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, in a speech at the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) Beneficial Ownership conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, identifies the enemies of the quest for openness and governance reforms, among others

    Hidden corporate ownership poses real and present danger to most countries, especially the developing ones such as ours.

    A report that will be frequently cited in this gathering is the one by the One Campaign, titled the “One Trillion Dollar Scandal.” The 2014 report claims that developing countries lose $1 trillion annually to corporate transgressions, most of it traceable to the activities of companies with secret ownership.

    Another report that may enjoy mention here is the 2015 report of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa chaired by former South African President Thabo Mbeki. The panel stated in its report that Africa had lost over $1 trillion over a 50-year period and that Africa loses more than $50 billion annually to illicit financial flows. Most of these illicit flows are perpetrated in the extractive sector and through companies with hidden ownerships.

    So for us in the developing world and especially in Africa, breaking the wall of secret corporate ownership is an existential matter. It is for us literarily a matter of life and death. Masked or Hidden corporate ownership is deeply implicated in the sad story of our underdevelopment.

    Yes, we know that anonymous companies are not always illegal or are not always designed to harm. But we also know that secrecy provides a convenient cover for the criminal and the corrupt. And we are not just operating from the theoretical or hypothetical standpoint.

    Nigeria is still grappling with the negative consequences of the use of opacity by senior members of government and their cronies between 1993 and 1998 awarding themselves juicy contracts in the extractive industry. One of such incidents involving a company called Malabu Oil and Gas has been and is still subject of criminal and civil proceedings in many parts of the world involving huge legal costs while the full benefit of the natural resource remains unexploited for the benefit of the people of Nigeria to which it belongs.

    We must be careful not to frame this campaign as a zero-sum between society and business. While governments and citizens stand to benefit from increased revenues, better law enforcement in this area should improve citizens’ welfare as a result of more ownership transparency. Many big businesses are equally concerned because most are legitimate and many have signed on to business integrity protocols such as EITI and the UN Global Compact.

    Legitimate businesses benefit not only from the better business climate that results when governments better serve their citizens but also from knowing who they are doing businesses with or competing against, they benefit from a level playing field, lower costs of doing business, and from reduced reputational risks.

    A paper by Stefan Zeume of the University of Michigan and two others showed that 1,105 publicly listed companies mentioned in the Panama Papers lost market capitalisation of $230 billion to the leaks, a loss of $200 million on the average per company.

    On many occasions, companies have incurred hefty fines in their home countries for engaging in bribery and other unethical conducts. Hidden ownership and other underhand business practices could thus erode profitability and shareholder value. This is why Ownership transparency is a potential win-win for all, business inclusive.

    So we need everyone on board: governments, businesses, development partners, international organisations, civil society groups, media, and citizens.

    For us in Nigeria, we will remain on board the EITI and the ownership transparency train because they align with our national priorities and will help to advance the electoral mandate of our administration, which is to fight corruption, combat insecurity and grow the economy.

    You will recollect that Nigeria was one of the first set of countries to join the EITI, one of the 12 EITI-implementing countries that piloted beneficial ownership disclosure, and one of the few countries that have disclosed beneficial ownership details in three audit reports. Through our national EITI agency (NEITI), we also published a comprehensive roadmap that will culminate in the establishment of the register of beneficial owners of companies operating in our extractive sector.

    But we are taking this beyond the extractive sector. At the May 2016 London Anti-Corruption Summit, President Muhammadu Buhari made a commitment to establish a public register of the beneficial owners of all companies operating in Nigeria.

    In December 2016, Nigeria joined the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and submitted a National Action Plan that prioritises the establishment of this all-encompassing and publicly accessible register. These are commitments that we made with all sense of seriousness. They are commitments that we made not because we are seeking applause or commendation, but because we are convinced they are in our best interests.

    To further reinforce our determination by our course of actions we presented a draft Money Laundering Prevention and Prohibition Bill to the National Assembly in 2016. The 2016 draft Money Laundering (Prohibition) (Amendment) Act attempts to cure the deficiency of the 2011 Act Money Laundering (Prohibition) (Amendment) Act ?11, 2011 to bring it in line with the FATF standards and it contains robust provisions on removing the barriers to full beneficial ownership disclosure in our laws.

    We are however mindful of challenges that will dog this initiative not just in our country but globally. Already, we have noted that the laws passed in some very developed countries do not go far enough to set the examples we really need as they do not cover territories and dependencies where most of the stolen assets from developed countries end up.

     

    Furthermore, we should expect the following reactions or problems:

    1. Resistance in many countries by vested interests to the passage of a comprehensive legal framework for the implementation of an effective beneficial ownership disclosure regime.
    2. The huge budgetary implications for developing countries of establishing, verifying and ensuring compliance.
    3. Balancing conflicting interests and the right to personal data protection/safeguards from political witch-hunting.
    4. Resolution of grey areas on the materiality threshold and the scope of beneficial ownership.

    These are of course all surmountable with the required political will and sustained pressure from the global community.

    Let me conclude by sharing a message that we constantly deliver to ourselves. As difficult as it may seem, establishing a publicly accessible register of beneficial owners of companies may the easiest part. Making the register count will take a lot of work. It will be important to develop mechanisms to verify the data disclosed and to build the capacities of tax authorities, law enforcement agencies, media and civic groups and even citizens to wade through, interrogate, make sense of and use the data in the registers.

    We also need to move away from the illusion of a magic bullet. In fact, there are no magic bullets in the quest for openness and governance reforms. Those who profit from opaqueness will not roll over. They do not have the incentives to do so.

    So, it is not inconceivable that as we are busy trying to break down the walls of corporate secrecy, they are also busy erecting new ones. So have no illusions that they will not devise grand schemes to game the system. In fact, they will try. Our task is to make it more difficult for them to hide or disguise the identities of real owners of companies to the detriment of the larger society. As with freedom, the price of openness will always be eternal vigilance.

    In a related vein, we should not look at EITI as the one-stop-shop for reversing the resource curse. It is a wonderful tool, which must be mainstreamed and combined with other tools to ensure that natural resources are more prudently managed and better deployed towards both economic growth and sustainable human development. While uniform standards are necessary, we should not make a fetish of them.

    It is important to take adequate account of national realities, to iterate, to be ever vigilant of and adapt to new arenas of work such as ownership transparency, and to focus more on impact than on just activities or box-ticking exercises. This is a powerful initiative. It can be even more potent by the collective commitment that we share.

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  • Ortom advises BSU panel on openness

    Ortom advises BSU panel on openness

    Benue State Governor Samuel Ortom, has charged members of the visitation panel to the Benue State University (BSU) to ensure confidentiality of presentations received from parties.

    He gave the charge at the old banquet hall of the Peoples House while inaugurating the panel to review activities of the university.

    He said by keeping the confidence of those concerned, they would feel free to make contributions without fear of reprisals.

    “Individual members of staff as well as the public at large should feel free to contribute positively. The visitation panel was a stock-taking exercise targeted at the comprehensive review of activities of Benue State University during the period under review,” he said.

    “The university community should see the visitation as an opportunity to honestly review their activities and present their views.”

    The terms of reference of the committee, amongst others, include: to inquire into the level of implementation of the White Paper of the last visitation report and to examine the administrative structure of the university in line with the law establishing the institution.

    The panel is also to establish the actual students’ population into regular and non-regular courses against the accredited facilities.

    The seven-member panel, which has Prof Zachary Anger Gundu as chairman and Iorpenda Tanguhar as secretary, has two months to submit its report.