Piqued by the dominance of foreign Chief Executives Officers (CEOs) at the helm of affairs of companies operating in Nigeria, Anabel Group has stressed the need for organisations to implement effective succession planning strategy that would help prepare Nigerian managers to handle key positions in multinational firms’ operating in the country.
The CEO, Anabel Group, Nicholas Okoye, while addressing participants at the succession plan conference, organised by the group in Lagos at the weekend, regretted that foreigners have taken over the management of virtually all the multinationals in Nigeria.
This is due to the dearth of capacity building, and absence of succession planning that exists in the corporate Nigerian firms’ and organisations, because their predecessors have not supported the local professionals to get the right leadership training.
He said Nigerian firms need to adopt local content strategy that would involve putting the right capacity to ensure that Nigerian managers are properly trained in the areas of handling the responsibilities of managing a multinational firm.
He urged organisations to involve the youths and support them through capacity building by initiating training programmes to enable them take positions in the succession plans of the organisation.
“Most of these firms’ have the last Nigerian chief executive officer 10 to 20 year ago. There was a time that all these multinationals were managed by Nigerians but now, they are not so.
“There are capacity gaps which are obvious, so companies and industries need to work together to proffer a solution to this problem by helping to bring up the capacity of Nigerian managers and leaders to a point where they can be given the responsibilities of managing those large conglomerates.
“If a company decides that it is within their interest and strategy to ensure that they have local capacity, then that plan for succession starts today, even if it will happen five years from now.
“You start training the people you have selected, give them the right skills, right exposure, right training processes and procedure to make sure they have capacity to manage; so when it is time for them to take over, they can do it effectively.
“But if that process has not started yet, the risk of having foreigners dominate every conglomerate in Nigeria will continue to dovetail. The longer we come up with some kind of solution or intervention plan to arrest the situation, the better for us.
“We need to find a solution to get Nigerians back to manage key responsibilities, it requires local content strategy. Local content strategy is not only giving people contracts, it also involves putting the right capacity in areas of offices of leadership, and if we are losing the ones we had in the past, then there is a problem.”
