NES30: CEOs dissect Nigeria’s public, private sector transition regulation

A review of Nigeria’s regulations and global best practice shows that Nigeria has a strong, well-established code of conduct that regulates the transition between the public and private sector, and the code of conduct has been adopted by many government parastatals.

During the CEOs Breakfast Meeting at the 30th Nigerian Economic Summit (NES30), the CEO took turns to observe some lapses and areas of strength in this code of conduct. This came after they held discussions on their various tables.

Professor Franklin Ngwu, Director, Lagos Business School Public Sector Initiative while making a presentation on behalf of his table, said they believe that it is good for the transition either from the public sector to the private sector or from the private sector to the public.

He noted that the three-year cooling off period can be said to be good, and in comparison, with Nigeria to other countries is also very good.

“However, given our institutional development, our politics and the structure of governance that we have, there is a challenge in the sense that the public sector leaders and officials are at the mercy of the President and Governors or even the Local government chairman”, he said.

In that light, Professor Ngwu said it means that the public sector leaders or regulators can say “I can remove you any time”.

“That incentive is there to do something for the private sector that you are targeting, we also said that we can also promote more of the private sector moving to the public sector and enhance what they are doing.

“We looked at the issue of enforcement and discussed that given the number of regulatory agencies we have in Nigeria, and also the political environment that we operate in, we are also seeing instances where proper investigation, regulation, enforcement can be compromised and it becomes an issue as well”, he added.

Furthermore, Ngwu said that they expect better enforcement, understanding of what is going on, and they also suggested that it might be better to start with rethinking the issue of secondment, so that some people might be in the public sector and move to the private sector.

“We also said there can also be a pull of fund whereby the people moving from private sector to the public sector can be better funded because if you are receiving a big salary at the private sector and you are now moving to a public sector where you are underpaid, you might be tempted to say that you cannot reduce your standard of living, so the best thing might be to have a pull of fund”, he said.

Dr Ike Chioke, the Managing Director of Afrinvest who made a presentation on behalf of his group said they felt that 3 years cooling off period is sufficient although standards in many jurisdictions was more like two years.

He said notwithstanding, there are still situations where someone has left a government agency and joined a player at the industry it used to regulate and that became an issue.

On the enforcement of the code of conduct, he said to a large extent, many companies may not actually be aware that this rule exists.

“We feel that a bit more needs to be done in the system in terms of the enforcement by clarifying the rules”, he added.

Lola Adekanye, Country Director and Deputy Regional Director at the Centre for International Private Enterprise while presenting for her table, said that they agreed that 3 years is good because of the cultural orientation, very hierarchical top-down leadership structure.

“So, three years is good to water down that level of control that public officers have. However, we came to the conclusion that three years might also be too much in one size fits all that doesn’t really work.

“We agreed that the rules as we have it pays a lot of attention to the cultural nuances in our country, so we said we needed to fix the root cause:”, she added.

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