IOD Harps on Adherence to Ethics in Organisations

Oluchi Chibuzor

The outgoing President of the Institute of Director IoD, Ahmed Mohammed, has disclosed its readiness to champion issues of ethical standards in Nigeria.

Mohammed, made the statement at the 2019 Biennial Lecture of the institute with the theme: “The hard soft side of corporate Governance: Character, Conduct and Culture”, held in Lagos, recently.

“There is no doubt that ethical culture and integrity, which are fundamental principles of good corporate governance form the bedrock for success and sustainability of any institution whether they are social service-oriented public sector, not-for-profit or profit private sector,” he added.

He said corruption have been allowed to grow into a culture which has made it impossible to select people with integrity.
“The culture of abusing the issues of ethics have grown, we feel and considered that as institute we must champion the culture of ethics within the context of governance, we must work our talk to bring change,” he said.

However, he added that the governing council of IoD Nigeria, under his leadership in the past two years has made giant strides towards enthroning an ethical culture, not only within the institute’s body of members but also beyond.

He added: “Coincidentally, this initiative is coming in the wake of recent development between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and one of the country’s prominent public quoted Oil and Gas industry leader, Oando Plc.

“As an apex professional organisation whose mandate is the enthronement of good corporate governance practice, these developments which have become public are certainly of great interest and concern to our Institute.

“We have accordingly issued our comments and expect our committee on Director Development to examine the outcome of these developments in their case studies for our company Direction Courses and for the committee on Ethics to recommend suitable action when the issues are finally resolved either way.”

Earlier, the Chairman of the occasion, Dr. Umaru Mutallab, noted the need to enshrine ethics into all level of the society to encourage fairness among people across board.

“I think the issue of corporate governance is something that is very topical, so it is time for IoD to continuously look at on how to improve, adjust to changing circumstances of our economy, country and people. It simply means fairness meaning that whatever you do whether in an institutional, government, home level so that everybody is taken to consideration and it should not be monopolised by anybody.”

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