Ugo Aliogo
The Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) at the weekend clarified that Aisha Abba Kyari, daughter of President Muhammadu Buhari’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, secured her recent appointment as an Assistant Vice President at the agency after undergoing a ‘stringent recruitment,’ which began in 2018.
The Head of Corporate Communications at NSIA, Titilope Olubiyi, said the allegations that she was not qualified for the position of an Assistant Vice President (AVP) were based on false information and mischief.
Olubiyi faulted insinuations that her appointment could have been influenced by her father.
“The clear mischief in the reports can be seen in the very false and unsubstantiated statements it contains. The report claims that AVP is the ‘highest level in the organisation’. This is not only false, but mischievous given AVP is the 9th level out of NSIA’s 22-level grading system.
A civil rights organisation, Coalition Against Corruption and Bad Governance (CACOBAG) had alleged that Abba Kyari’s appointment violated set procedure at the NSIA, adding that her position was not advertised and that she did not meet the criteria for appointment.
But investigations revealed that her recruitment did not violate or contravene the set recruitment process at the NSIA, which clearly has a robust and stringent recruitment policy that has enabled it to attract and continue to retain world-class talents.
The agency disclosed that Ms Abba-Kyari’s recruitment was based on her application for one of the positions duly advertised by NSIA in mid-2018 while her selection for the post was based on her academic qualifications, as well as international and local work experiences.
She also went through an interview process that all staff in her level must pass through, before she was found worthy of the appointment.
It was gathered that recruitment into NSIA is deliberately stringent in order to ensure that only suitable and competent people are on the staff roll of the organisation.
This fact is demonstrated in the consistently impressive returns of the NSIA, which has made it one of the best run sovereign wealth agencies in the world.
Olubiyi described as false the claim that the candidate’s package was N32 million.
She also faulted quotes attributed to NSIA directors in some media reports saying they “are also entirely false.”
She said there was no time when any of the directors of NSIA made such statements and neither was there any document to validate the purported accounts as published.
“There is no correlation between the recruitment process of the candidate, and the approval process of an ED or Board member. These are mutually exclusive and independent events.”
On the allegation that the Board members of NSIA refused to interview Abba Kyari, she also described it as false.
“In actual fact, a Board member in the appropriate sub-committee of the Board participated in the process,” Olubiyi added.
