ICSAN’s roundtable to strengthen capacity on boardroom governance

Irked by the issues surrounding poor corporate governance in some institutions, stakeholders have canvassed an urgent need for proper ethical guidance to strengthen the capacity of governments in boardrooms.

They argued that it was important for organisations to entrench the principles of corporate governance to guarantee business sustainability.

To this end, Chairman, Corporate Governance Capacity Building Committee of the 2021 Roundtable on Corporate Governance, Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators of Nigeria (ICSAN), Adeyinka Hassan, at a press conference in Lagos, said plans had been put together by the institute to host a roundtable that would strengthen capacity and policies on effective boardroom governance.

He said the roundtable with the theme, ‘Ethical Governance in the Boardroom: Implications for Stakeholders’, slated to hold virtually on May 20, was to bring out the best from members of boards of organisations and to upscale skills of members and non-members on corporate governance due to management failures.

“If you call yourself a board member, how do you conduct yourself in the boardroom? How do you deal with issues related to conflict of interest? How do you manage substitution when they arise?

“As we all know, conflict is part of the business. So, you have to have a structured way of resolving conflicts when you are doing business. A lot of these issues relate to conduct. So how do we conduct ourselves as members of the board in the boardroom? So those are the issues that we are going to be bringing to the fore.

“What this committee is all about is upscaling skills for members of the institute and non-members. You bring them on board, and we help them through our learning processes since corporate governance in itself is a journey. As things keep improving, regulation and law changes and we respond immediately as we see all these changes to bring out the best and follow the best practices in corporate governance,” he said.

Chair, Publicity and Advocacy Committee, ICSAN, Mrs. Lynda Onefeli, said the institute had contributed positively to how policies are made.

She said ICSAN has taken corporate governance to tertiary institutions, where the students are groomed on how to become better corporate governance leaders in future.