New President of Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators of Nigeria, ICSAN, Taiwo Owokalade has announced a seed capital of N10m for capacity building programme for aspiring practitioners.
The president intends to create young practitioners’ platform in order to catch them young and build the spirit of private practice in them. The programme will therefore empower the young professionals with the skills of setting up practice firms and all it entails.
Speaking after he was inaugurated as the new president recently in Lagos, Owokalade whose intention is to grow the industry of chartered secretaries and administrators in Nigeria recognised that the soul of a professional institute lies in its private practice.
To further grow the body, he proposes to institutionalise a plan to restructure the body’s licensing methodology. “We shall introduce practice stamps to enable our members distinguish themselves and their works. We shall make the license and stamp automatic for our associates”, he said
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Owokalade also plans to aggressively pursue membership growth as a strength for the institute. “As a Corporate Governance Institute that preaches Governance as a panacea to sound business practice, we should therefore be readily available in all facets of human endeavor; be it public sector, private sector of big, medium and SMES including NGOs. To realize this, we need to grow our numbers rapidly in order to fill the huge gap needing our services”, he said.
He said the law already states who could practice company secretaryship; it is therefore our duty to adapt the inclusiveness principle of bringing all these practitioners on board, train them, enhance their capacities and make them our members. The body, he said shall revisit its membership process in order to ensure that no practicing company secretary is excluded from our membership irrespective of their years of service.
He also promised to enrich membership with rewarding schemes including free courses with enhanced credits.
The ICSAN new president also desires to vigorously pursue a name change to Chartered Governance Institute which aligns with the global trend of the practice. ”We shall leverage on our partners in the National Assembly family including the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) and other relevant stakeholders towards achieving this in record time”.
While promising to accelerate the institutes’ digitalisation process, Owokalade promised to expose the workforce to the best of training opportunities both in Nigeria and abroad in order for them to be able to give the institute the best. “We shall continue to see to their welfare while also providing a much more enabling environment for work”.
He said the institute during his tenure shall push its energy and resources towards the commencement of its Secretariat in Lagos and a structure in Abuja. “We shall also consider the feasibility of having regional structures in all the six(6) geographical zones in order to serve our growing membership population”.
In his valedictory speech, immediate past President, Body Ayeku said during his tenure, there was tremendous progress in membership drive. He also said the institute quickly migrated to digital platform for the conduct of lectures for its students due to the restrictions on mass gatherings in compliance with COVID-19 protocols. “As a result, our students were able to attend lectures and participate in the examinations which led to the admission of 175 in 2020 and 148 in 2021 as Graduate Chartered Secretaries and Administrators”
Ayeku who assisted to create more visibility of the institute said he had successful engagements with the regulatory authorities (Corporate Affairs Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Nigerian Stock Exchange – now Nigerian Exchange Limited) to address the concerns of stakeholders on some regulations issued in 2020 and 2021.
In his speech, the chairman of the occasion, Abubakar Sulaiman who is Director General of National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies, NILDS said NILDS is ready to partner ICSAN in the development of corporate governance especially in the public sector.
