The issue of tenure limit for banks chief executives and auditing firms has been the subject of discussion in recent times, with some criticizing the CBN for imposing such tenure limits.

Major- General Sebastian Onwuama (rtd) President Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria {ICAN} ....The nation Nigeria did not arise by choice or desires of the individual components of the nation but as a result of an arbitrary map drawn by the colonialists,

President, Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, ICAN, Major- General Sebastian Onwuama (rtd) however, says that the tenure limit is necessary for good corporate governance and that the Institute’s limit for auditing firm is five years. In this interview with Babajide Komolafe and Providence Obuh, he identifies leadership as the greatest impediment to the nation’s development in the last fifty years, adding that there is little to celebrate. Read on

Nigeria at 50, some are of the     opinion that there is no reason for the kind of elaborate celebration intended by the government. Do you share this view?
Yes and no, yes because there are other third world countries that have within the past thirty, forty, fifty years surpassed the expectations in governance and in economic development of their people, and no because in the history of nation-building, fifty years is not enough to judge level of national cohesion and level of economic development. You will recall that Mexico recently celebrated the 200th anniversary of its independence from Spain, as developed as it is, it still has basic and fundamental problems of governance, security of lives and property and even of  economic development.

The nation Nigeria did not arise by choice or desires of the individual components of the nation but as a result of an arbitrary map drawn by the colonialists, so there are inherent and fundamental issues of ethnic differences, religious differences, social differences and a period of fifty years, in my own opinion, is not enough to build a united and cohesive state, so we will get there,  probably in the next fifty years we will be singing another song entirely,

so on that note, I say that it is not a very fair comment to say that within fifty years we have not achieved anything. If you look at the unit that formed the society, that is the family, 25-30-year old marriages have been known to break down at the least provocation, but we thank God today, we still remain as one and indivisible nation and I believe the future holds much more for us as a nation. We are gradually finding out that there is unity in diversity, and that despite these fundamental problems, we will get there. We are still counted as a developing nation, some will say we are still under-developed, all around us we see evidence of underdevelopment.

Looking back at the  last 50 years, what single factor can you identify as the greatest impediment to the development of Nigeria?

The greatest single impediment to development of Nigeria is that of leadership. We are yet to have a leadership that responds to the needs and yearnings of the people. Like I said, yes it is good to have a score card but it is too early in the day bearing in mind the fundamental barbarity of our nationhood and I’m saying problem of leadership because we have not yet evolved a leadership that the people have a say in electing. We have always had a system – whether military or civil – that has been sort of imposed on the populace.

The very moment we have a leadership that the people will say we don’t want you because you have increased the price of bread, we will rise against you and that leadership listens to them like in Mozambique, a third world country like Nigeria, people went out in the streets because there was an increase in the price of bread, but here, as rich as we are, we cannot say yes we’ve done something that has added value to the lives of the citizenry. Look at all the indices of economic growth/development, is it per capita income, is it GDP, is it level of infrastructure, which single sector of the economy has met with the minimum World Bank requirement that we should now roll out the drums  and say we have achieved a lot? Like I said, we will get there but the most  important thing is to analyse the problem, we are never short of analysts in Nigeria, but we are very much in short supply of genuine responses to the needs of our people.

Recently, we had some electoral reforms, do you feel these reforms are adequate to produce the kind leadership you are referring to?
Constitutional reforms or electoral reforms the world over, are not a one-stop shop incident, you make your mistakes, correct them and move on, that is why a country like the United States has come a very long way, the problems we are witnessing now they did experience the same thing, but we’ve got to start from somewhere and I believe we, as a people, have started off by observing that the type of electoral processes we’ve had in the past had never adequately addressed the contentious issues that have really made it impossible for us as a people to elect a government of our choice.  I can tell you one thing, whether it is under military dispensation or civil political arrangement, the problems are still the same.

Until the votes of Nigerians count, we can never say we have addressed the issue of leadership and governance. Until an elected leader feels he has a moral obligation to the electorate to deliver the dividends of democracy, then we are yet to start. The electoral reform is aimed at addressing those fundamental issues, my hope and expectations is that they will, but if they do not, we should not lose hope, we should continue to strive. If we talk about  the electorate electing a leader of their choice, I tell you one thing, the last time I voted in any election was during the election of Abiola in 1993, ever since then, I have failed to participate in any election because I have always felt that my vote does not count, and it has never counted, but I’m very  optimistic that in the forthcoming election, I must vote because there are visible signs of improvement of redressing the deficiencies of the past, so I am hopeful and I want to believe that I will vote.

In countries like the US, when the issue of election is coming up like this, we often see institutions or organisations that occupy critical positions in the country coming out to endorse candidates they believe would deliver. But that has not been the case in Nigeria, especially a body like ICAN.

Any  likelihood that the Institute would endorse a candidate?
You are perfectly correct, and I want to tell you that the Nigerian political system is not ripe and is not yet ready to accept such stance. If you make a statement, you are in support of zoning, you are not in support of zoning, you are in support of Mr. A or B, there will be a lot of meanings read into it that yes you as a people or as an institution, have left your stance as being an apolitical institute, now you will be classified as one of those who have calculated attempt at maligning, deriding, bringing to disrepute the work and achievement. We are not yet politically matured to accept  that institutions have a right to express their views without any undertone being read into it.

As an Institution and also the ICAN president, how will you assess our achievement as a country in the area of manpower development, that is one, two, how would you assess the attitude of government at all levels to the issue of manpower development?

Looking at the big picture, Nigeria, I think in Africa, has produced the highest level of skilled and professional manpower. By Nigerians I mean both Nigerians at home and those in the Diaspora, there is practically no country of the world you go to without hearing or seeing Nigerians occupying very strategic and important positions, these are Nigerians and they still lay claims to Nigerian citizenship.

In terms of our internal national manpower development, I think that we have recorded a huge success, they could have done better, at the dawn of independence, how many universities did we have? How many graduates did we have? In my village in those days, we glorified and looked at one or two graduates in the community as men sent from the gods to visit we lesser mortals, but today, there is a likelihood that if you throw a stone in Tejuosho and Iddo markets, it will likely land on the head of a university graduate and this shows the level of manpower development we have attained since independence.
Well this is quantitatively, qualitatively there are lots of questions and employers have expressed grieve at the quality of the manpower we have to employ. Some people say Nigerian graduates are not employable, and I say, do you talk of unemployed graduates when there are no employment opportunities?  There are two sides to the question, you must have skilled and trained manpower resources.

Secondly, you must have employment opportunities, where one is greatly in deficit, you cannot talk about deficiency of the other. If we have a system that has opportunities for young graduates and these graduates cannot fill those available vacancies, then you can now begin to talk about low quality of graduates, but where you don’t even have facilities to engage these graduates, I think it will be uncharitable to say that our graduates are unemployable.

It is true again that the quality of education in our tertiary institutions has not met expectations both from world academic standards and our internal standards. No Nigerian university has been listed among the first 1000 universities in the world, it’s not good enough, if we are to be one of the 20 leading economies by the year 2020, our tertiary institutions should be listed among those high performance tertiary institutions.

In terms of qualitative capacity-building in the nation, I think we still have a long way to go, the standard of academics in tertiary institutions has fallen grossly, lack of infrastructure, the quality of lectureship, the quality of exam processes in the universities; they have funny things they call sorting, I don’t know whether they are sorting the good from the bad, whatever terminology they are using, I think is very uncomplimentary.

In my days as a university undergraduate, you go for the exam, internal exam not the final exams, the next person to you sits about three feet away and the person by your right may be a level 100 student and you a level 300 student, so there is no way you can communicate with each other, you cannot bring in accessories to assist you, when you pass, you know you pass.  And again, we as undergraduates had our role models – those who graduated with a 2.1 or a first class and have been  employed in the multinationals and in government institutions where they flew the flag of the university. But now, there is a complete erosion of societal and family values, the model of our young men and women are those graduates who six months after graduation, visit them on the campuses with SUVs to announce they have arrived when we don’t know where they are coming from. So many vices have really affected the quality of skilled manpower in the tertiary institutions.

What about the attitude of government to manpower development?
The issue of government whether at the federal, state or local level, cannot do more than they have done because of the high cost of education.

Modern education has gone beyond the use of blackboards and chalk, now you  have IT-driven educational system and the capital cost involved in this type of education is too huge for government to get involved in. Primary school scholars elsewhere are computer literate and they have these facilities. No government can afford to give our  teeming population of young men and women the type of education they need.

I think it was wise of the government to  allow private institutions to establish universities and they should do everything possible to encourage these private universities in terms of provision of basic infrastructure like electricity, water, good roads etc, because if you have a five-star university located in a remote village that has the conducive environment for learning, then they should have good roads, constant electric power supply, potable water and above all, they should have security.

Where these things have to be provided by the university, it is going to be at a great cost to that university and definitely they will pass on this cost to parents and guardians of wards and thereby increasing the cost of qualitative education in these tertiary institutions. On one hand, government cannot afford to finance qualitative education in the context of a 21st Century educational system because of the huge capital cost; on the other hand, the private sector is in the best position to provide these facilities on the condition that, the cost of providing these facilities are exclusive of cost of providing infrastructure like roads, electricity and water. But most importantly, I keep saying that the value system in our tertiary institutions must change,  we must go back and review our societal value system, who are the role models of these students?

I have always had opportunity to talk to students in tertiary institutions that are credited by ICAN and I keep saying it that we must go back to our old value system where we reward hard work,  honesty and integrity and we sanction anti_societal vices like cultism and so on. And that the role models of students should be those that have achieved laurels through dint of hard work, not through sorting, not through corrupting the educational process, those things cannot help us. A student who makes a 2.1 through illegal and illegitimate means is a burden and is a liability to the society he is going to serve.

This has a chain reaction, his perception of achievement is cheating and we are saying no, it is  wrong, we must leave those values behind, they are not part and parcel of what will make Nigeria great even in the next fifty years.

Let’s look at accountancy in Nigeria, assuming that we don’t have bodies like ICAN and ANAN, what will the practice of accounting be like?

You cannot think of an economy or a society without the accountancy profession, it is like saying you are going to have a car without the engine.  The accountancy practice is the heart of financial business transaction, accountancy is the language of finance, of commerce, so if you don’t have professionals in that field, then you have not started.

I have had the opportunity and privilege of attending various international seminars and workshops, the emphasis all along, whether these are seminars or workshops facilitated by the World Bank or the International Federation of Accountants (the governing body to which ICAN belongs), has always been on building capacity for public financial management and also compliance with internationally recognised auditing and accounting standards. So without this body, Nigeria, one, cannot on its own, manage its resources properly.  Number two, we cannot relate with external partners in business in the language they will understand, that is in terms of rolling out financial statements and interpreting such statements to ensure that potential investors have the information, the material they require to make  informed decision, so the accountancy profession and the accountants and auditors are a strategic factor in the equation, that is a constant, whichever way you look at it.