By Nike Popoola

Wednesday, 3 Nov 2010

The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mr. Lamido Sanusi, has said that the bank plans to introduce a new remedial programme on corporate governance to guide the board of directors in their responsibilities.

Sanusi said this during the continuous education programme for directors of financial institutions, organised in collaboration with FITC in Lagos on Tuesday.

Sanusi said,”A remedial programme is to be inaugurated to implement and monitor a new set of corporate governance guidelines incorporating a range of reforms to include education of board of directors on their responsibilities and on the unethical and allegedly fraudulent activities as well as the penalties involved.”

This, he said, was in addition to its plans to create a specialised function focusing on governance and ensure that governance best practices were entrenched in the industry.

Sanusi stressed the need for a value-based board leadership for corporate governance in the financial services industry.

He said, ”A value-based leadership aligns the organisation‘s mission, vision, values, strategy, performance management, rewards and recognition as well as processes and systems.

The CBN boss noted that the major set-back experienced in countries of the world today remained the growing abuse of good corporate governance principles, arising from poor value-based leadership.

In order to instill value-based leadership in the country, Sanusi said that concerted efforts should be geared at guiding organisations to achieve the necessary high standards of corporate practices.

According to him, ”It is in the context of this that the CBN in collaboration with the regulatory agencies, is aggressively pursuing measures to stem unethical practices in the boardrooms of our financial services firms.”

The Managing Director, FITC, Dr. Lucy Newman, said that the essence of the training was to ensure that bank directors were continuously availed with the requisite knowledge and skills, which their onerous responsibilities demanded.

She said,”Value-based board leadership for corporate relevance is timely, considering the ongoing events in both the domestic and international financial services sectors. We reason that leadership at the board level as well as corporate relevance and business continuity issues are increasingly becoming critical to organisational success and sustainability.”

She pointed out that boards of financial institutions were in the business of trust, ethics and professionalism, adding that the directors of financial institutions had by their individual and collective responsibilities been entrusted with the resources of their respective financial institutions.

Source: Punch