Sunday Williams
10 July 2009
interview
Abuja — The eight years tenure of Malam Ahmed Al-Mustapha as the Registrar General of Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) ended last week. In this interview few days to his departure, Al-Mustapha explains to newsmen his dilemma and successes.
Looking back when you were appointed and now, would you say you are fulfilled?
We came and inherited lots and lots of problems, some of which were well known to you. We set out to work and by the grace of God we have made some modest achievements. When we came, the atmosphere was not encouraging, we were at Garki in a loan property, the staff morale was very low and there was indiscipline and no standard. That is not to say that the former management did not do anything good otherwise we wouldn't have met the Commission in the first place.
So we had the initial challenges and we tried to prioritised and decided to move out from the Area 11 Garki premises because the staff were not finding it comfortable to work so we got short and medium term solution where we acquire a property in Wuse Zone 5 and moved to have incorporation processes easier and shorter as such reduced the steps. We then computerised our operations, sanitised our staff by doing some cleaning up which we are still doing, introduced some incentives, training and retraining which include change management or their behaviours and appearance.
You know that the most important asset of this Commission is human resource and therefore no matter what we do, it will not be consider being too much. After that, we now started building the new head office as a permanent solution and by the grace of God we are already in the building. That's the summary of some of the things we did. When you are trying to introduce changes you have resistance. We had some initial sabotage. Some of the challenges were not within but without and outside our control. There is the issue of power and issue of infrastructure generally which include communication, absence of street naming and house numbers in most of our cities for compliance and enforcement, absence of identification cards to verify the authenticity of the existence of a subscriber or Director. Relatively low level of literacy in the country especially in the areas of internet awareness was also another challenge.The summary of the challenges is that we are trying to be a world class company registry in an African environment.
You once fingered saboteurs as being behind some of the problems you faced. Can you shed light on this?
Well, we remain focus because whatever you are doing in your life you must anticipate challenges and to me I view the sabotage as a challenge not as a problem.Whatever you are doing if you remain focus and committed you will surmount it but if you digress, you will have problem. The best thing is to ignore it, concentrate, remain focus and it will die down.
Is there any decision you took in the course of performing your duties that you regret now?
No, I have never taken a decision alone. When we came in without being immodest I introduced management retreat in which every year from senior manager and above, we retired to Kaduna,Enugu,Lokojo or any city in Nigeria and ex-ray ourselves and processes.
While I will not say we were perfect but we made sure all the operators were involved in the decision making process. Even the review of our process were never imposed on our staff, it evolves from them and we do resolutions at the end of every management retreat and we set up a committee for the implementation of the communiqué and that has helped us a lot because for every decision whether it's a human resource issue, or issue involving our processes, is debated exhaustively.So, our task was made easier because in the management retreat we set the general direction of the Commission and when we came we merely ensured the implementation of what has been agreed by all.
As you are leaving, what is the level of compliance in annual returns by companies?
There is great improvement. I may not give you statistics right now but I can assure you that it has significantly improved.
Do you think your exit will affect the standard of the Commission?
Let me make it clear that I do not believe in the invincibility of one man and I don't believe that the little we have achieve here is as a result of one man. It is a collective responsibility. I may have provided the leadership and probably the atmosphere; it was not a one man show. So I do not think that we must insist that is only that person is capable.
In my view that is if I'm not here, we tried to establish a system that can drive itself and so hopefully even if I'm not here, I am leaving a system that is International Standard Organisation (ISO) compliant and can hopefully drive the Commission. It is my hope and prayer that whether I am here or not for the reasons I adduced above, by the grace of God things will continue to work and probably even better.
What do you feel that you wanted to do that you could not do?
I have not finished our computerisation process. I have not finished transforming our hard copies of documents into electronic copies called dogman management system. We are in the process of reviewing, revamping and upgrading our registration software and that we have not finished, so these are the few things I would have loved to do.
Throughout your eight-year in office was there a day you felt like leaving the job?
Let me confessed to you that if you are looking for one organisation with constant pressure, then this is the first place. Stakeholders are the most militant (I don't mean carrying arms). Lawyers, Chartered Accountants, Chartered secretaries, journalists, law enforcement agencies are interested in our services, members of the National Assembly are interested in our services and the business communities are interested in our services.
These are people who know their rights and unfortunately, knowing your right in this country is equivalent to having no patience. That is to say they will not give you an inch.We have been operating in an environment in which we are caught between three files diametrically opposed to each other. On the one hand, our customers and members of the general public will want us to register companies speedily. On the other hand, the law enforcement agents, the journalists and the legislatures will want us to ensure that there is no fake registration. We must ensure quality that if some people register companies, they must be identifiable. Now our duty is to marry the two and it wasn't easy. So I will say in few circumstances. I wouldn't say I felt like quitting, but I felt challenged.
What is the latest in the delisting of companies?
I wish I counted it as one of our major achievements. As a matter of fact as I'm speaking now we already have the official gazette of first set of almost 10,000 companies already out signifying their formal delisting.
Is it that the companies did not made any attempt to file in returns or what?
You know Companies and Allied Matters Act 1999, CAMA requests us to give three notices. Some of the companies actually responded to say that they are actually out of business and don't mind being delisted.
Some of their letters were not delivered, some it was delivered but no respond.Still we gave them the benefit of doubt and serialised the names in various news papers as a result of which some of them who could not be reach saw the publication and responded in the same way I mentioned.After the publication we gave a date as the last chance and it is the product of that exercise collectively. That is to say we have exhausted all reasonable means of reaching out to the companies to make sure that we don't wrongly strike them off.
What will you wish to be remembered for?
I will wish to be remembered as a humble public servant who sees things work.
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