By Babajide Komolafe

Association of Certified and Chartered Accountants (ACCA) said its mission in Nigeria is to produce finance professionals with the competence to work anywhere in the world.

“Our vision for Nigeria is for us to be able to have  finance professionals  that will do our country proud that you train them here and they go and become CEO of Mobile  Australia or Mobile  USA and the person started from Nigeria. Basically that is our aim because we wish to train somebody who go to different parts of the world because of his competence, capability and hard work, that is what we intend to achieve in Nigeria,” said Mrs.  Toyin Ademola, head of ACCA Nigeria.

Speaking with Vanguard, she said one of the aim of ACCA is Nigeria is to work in a public interest by promoting accountability.

She said beyond this, the cardinal goal of the global accounting profession is providing opportunities for everybody  to become professionals.

She said, “Our values are accessibility, opportunity, accountability and innovation. Our missions basically wherever  we are,  especially in Nigeria is to be able to improve the finance or accounting profession and give opportunity to lot of people, give accessibility to a lot of people. When we say accessibility and accountability some people will wonder what does that mean.

“We have some cases in some countries and even in some professions in Nigeria where you can’t be a member of a professional body until you have a degree, but we in ACCA know that a degree is not the end point. It is a process. It is about the education, the information, the knowledge that you actually have.

“That is why we say we give people access and opportunity, for instance somebody who didn’t get a degree does not need an accessing company to test his qualification, you will be accessed based on the qualification that you have, whether  it is ‘O’level, whether it  OND, whatever it is, it will be based strictly on that.

“Now because someone has an ‘O’level qualification doesn’t mean the person cannot become an Accountant- General of the Federation. If you think about it we work a lot on that because what ACCA is working to achieve is well rounded. It covers leadership, it covers finance, and it covers competency development and many others.

“So we believe that at the end of the day if you have the basic necessity which is you can speak English and have a certain degree of skills in mathematics, like we know accounting deals basically with mathematics, then we believe that everything at the end of the day is about training, it is about development, it is about teaching. So basically that is what we believe”.