Former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Kingsley Moghalu has hinged the failure of corporate governance structure in Nigeria’s Public sector to undue political interference that characterised most of the appointments.
The former deputy governor of Nigeria’s Apex bank made the disclosure while delivering Keynote address on Thursday in Abuja at the Annual director’s conference which has the theme ‘implementing Best Corporate governance practice in Nigeria’s Public and Private sector’.
“Corporate governance structure is essential in creating governance value on a sustainable basis. Businesses will suffer commercial losses where cooperate governance is weak. Public sector cooperation will fail to deliver their mandates, if the governance structure is weak,” Moghalu said.
Speaking further, the former deputy governor also lamented that the distress witnessed in Nigeria’s financial sector during the global economic crisis is 60-70% caused by poor corporate governance structure in most Nigeria’s commercial banks.
“We know how many people lost their deposits, shares, had strokes and many people met an early death because of the failure of governance cooperate governance structure,” he said.
He said the apex bank under the then Governor and now His Royal Highness Emir Muhammadu Sanusi the second, took a decision that no bank would fail, while also making the depositor king in the banking sector reforms of the Central Bank.
”The National Assembly should amend the structure of Public corporations such as the NNPC. The Necessary two actions are to partially privatize NNPC and bring in companies and individuals to invest in them and improve accountability. Also, the powers of the Petroleum Minister need to be reduced to avoid arbitrariness”
In his remarks, Emir of Kano, Muhammdu Sanusi II said, “The banks reforms we embarked on in the Central Bank helps us in interrogating key corporate governance structure issues,and we introduced number of reforms.
According to the Royal father, “Many distressed banks that had issues when we commenced the reforms then had CEOs that wants to stay forever. So we had Bank Managing director that had stayed for 20-22 years. There was no independence on the boards, directors were handpicked,and they had owned the banks,and determine what will happen.”
According to the Emir of Kano,”We had a Bank CEO that set up so many companies,and her house maid was a registered shareholder in those companies,her son Executive director. They lent themselves billions of naira and took the money out of the country while depositors had to suffer. This is why we embarked on those reforms which Kingsley really helped us out with his experience.”
“There was a case in which she took a loan to the board,the board declined it,she came back and approved it in her capacity and signed.This is what you get when you allow someone sit in a chair and become so powerful for many years”
Earlier in his remarks,Rufai Mohammed,the President and Chairman of the Governing Council said the concept of corporate governance is to ensure individuals are held to account at each point in time of their stewardship both in Public and Private sector.
He said the resolutions of the conference will be made available to the government,as he poited out that only countries with the best governance structure would attract the right kind of private capital to put the economy on track and consolidate the economy on better footings.
