Accenture, the celebrated management consultancy firm, may have been shown the way out of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) offices as its functions have been replaced with other bodies set up by the NSE to continue with its controversial restructuring projects.
BusinessWorld Investigations can now reveal that with this development, the celebrated Enterprise Transformation Programme of the exchange has been abandoned for a modified programme formulated by the new management of the Exchange.
Under the new development, new directorates and units have been created to revamp the organogram. This move is coming after huge sums of money have been paid to Accenture by the NSE. The exchange sources indicated that the latest decision is an indictment of the quality of work done by Accenture.
Informed sources close to this latest move by the new management of the Exchange observed that it is part of few disturbing signals of the situation at the Exchange even as its corporate governance contradicts the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) new Code of Corporate Governance for Nigerian companies.
The Exchange currently has an acting company secretary/legal adviser, having moved the substantive company secretary/legal adviser to one of the operating directorates in the wake of SEC’s intervention in the management of the Exchange last August.
The changes in the office of the company secretary are at variance with the provisions of the Companies and Allied Matters Act and the Corporate Governance, Code. The Corporate Governance Code provides, for instance, in Section 8.1, that the appointment of a company secretary should be achieved through a rigorous process comparable to the appointment of a director. It also provides that the appointment and termination of a company secretary should be tabled and ratified by the board. None of these has happened at the Exchange.
Apart from appointing interim president and interim administrator (now interim deputy president of council) for the Exchange, the commission has recently directed the Exchange to admit 10 new “public interest” persons to the Council.
The terms of this appointment are unknown, especially with regard to duration. Also, prior to the new appointments, the Exchange had suspended the Memorandum and Articles of Association that was in operation, opting for a discarded Memart that conveniently provided for an expanded and unwieldy number of persons in the Council, contrary to the spirit of Section 4.1 of the SEC Corporate Governance Code that provides for the composition and structure of the board.