Zainab Samshuna Ahmed has a mandate to reform NEITI
The federal government at the weekend appointed a new Executive Secretary (ES) for the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) to place the former official recently fired over allegations of mismanagement.
Zainab Samshuna Ahmed’s appointment was directed by the Presidency following her appointment into the NEITI National Stakeholders Working Group (NSWG) last August.
NEITI’s Director of Communication, Orji Ogbonnaya Orji, said the appointment, conveyed in a letter by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Yayale Ahmed, is for a single term of five years.
Mrs Ahmed, a former Managing Director, Kaduna Industrial and Finance Company (KIFC), succeeds Haruna Yunusa Saeed, who was sacked “in the public interest” in the wake of allegations of fraud and incompetence levelled against him.
In the wake of allegations of corruption in the leadership of agency as a result of reports of an internal wrangling among some of its top officials, an administrative investigation panel had found out that “There was absolute leadership failure at the NEITI Secretariat” as “The ES does not have full control of staff and secretariat.” Mrs Ahmed, an Accounting graduate and holder of a Masters degree in Business
Administration from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, would face the immediate challenge of reorganising the NEITI secretariat and reinvigorate it to effectively deliver on its mandate as promoter of transparency and accountability in the country’s extractive industries.
The NEITI secretariat is pivotal to the effort by Nigeria to achieve Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) compliant status by April next year.
Nigeria, which is currently categorised among ‘EITI candidate countries’, was last month denied validation as compliant nation after the validation committee of the Board of the international transparency body found the country’s progress did not meet the minimum criteria for confirmation as EITI Compliant country.
Meeting the conditions
To date, five countries have achieved the standard required to be designated as EITI Compliant. They include Azerbaijan, Ghana, Liberia, Mongolia and Timor-Leste. To achieve ‘Compliant status’, countries must complete a rigorous, independent assessment of their disclosure and reporting practices.
Within the six months grace period granted Nigeria to remedy its status, NEITI is expected to take six steps to meet certain conditions spelt out under the EITI Validation Quality Assurance Mechanism, which the global EITI Board uses to determine a country’s ‘Candidate or Compliant status’.
The six remedial steps include mobilising the country’s resources towards the conclusion and dissemination of its on-going 2006-2008 audit report in the oil and gas sector; development of a Board Charter to strengthen the work of the NSWG, while NEITI Secretariat will ensure that all government disclosures are based on audited accounts of oil, gas and mining companies as well as relevant government agencies.
The NEITI Board has till January 15, 2011, or latest April, 2011 to set out work-plans to actualise these remedial actions.
No comments:
Post a Comment