Dr Kayode Olushola Fasua is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Association of National Accountants of Nigeria, ANAN.
Fasua holds a Doctorate Degree in Accounting and Finance, Master’s of Science Degree in Accounting, MBA (Administration), and Post Graduate Diplomas in Financial Management. He also holds the Fellowship of ANAN, Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria, Chartered Institute of Treasury Management of Nigeria and Chartered Systems Accountants (USA).
He is a member, Nigerian Institute of Management, a Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) and Certified in Risk and Information Security Control (CRISC) ISAC. A former Director General (DG) of the Nigerian College of Accountancy (NCA), ANAN Training Arm in Kwall, Plateau State, he reckons as the first home-grown DG of the College, being a Course 2 Graduate of the NCA (1995/1996) Set.
Fasua served in various capacities while in the College as Lecturer, Bursar, Systems Analyst, Director of Students Affairs, Director of ICT, Head of Administration and Director of Studies. He is credited with the feat in part of setting up the ICT structure for ANAN over 20 years ago. He has also served as member/Secretary in various ANAN Committees and as Resource Faculty Member with various training institutions. In this interview, he speaks on the 41st AGM of ANAN, the investiture of the 13th President and the major strides of the body. Excerpts:
How has it been steering the ship of ANAN leadership since you took over office?
It has been quite hectic, a lot of huge experiences I have had and that has not been very easy managing the entire association of over 50,000 members, managing their resources, finances, and training and ensuring their professionalism in their places of work.
Major achievements so far…
These things are better identified by outsiders, the people whose lives we impact, but, from where I am sitting, first and foremost, to the Council of the Association, I have been able to give them informed information for their policy-making and I have been able to effectively implement Council decisions. The staff, their welfare has greatly improved since I came on board. Physical infrastructure in our College and University in Jos has also improved.
In fact, there has been massive infrastructural development which you can easily see by yourself, to make students and staff comfortable, the take-home of staff has been improved upon. There has been training and retraining for our staff since I came on board, just to make sure they are up to date with whatever they render to the Association.
For the members of the Association, we have been able to organise training for them in conjunction with Council. Last year alone, we had eight sessions of Mandatory Professional Development Training Programmes instead of the normal six, we had a few international training last year also, despite the hard economic situation in the country and we have been able, in a long time, 20 years, been able to publish register of members both physical and soft copy. There are quite a lot to talk about.
What would you say makes ANAN a preferred choice for upcoming accountants?
What actually brought about the establishment of ANAN was because the way accountants were trained in Nigeria was not actually satisfactory to the founders of ANAN, that is, the Article-ship System whereby you don’t have to be a graduate or have first degree or HND certificate. All you needed to do was to get yourself attached to an accountant you like and he shows you what to do, just like an apprenticeship.
All the major disciplines like law, before you become a lawyer you have to go to law school after your graduation as a law student, the same thing for engineers, doctors and architects. And so, we felt, why will the accountant be degraded to the point of only school cert, sometimes not even a school cert holder can become an accountant. And so, ANAN came up and said, before you can become an accountant under ANAN, you must have a first degree in accounting or management sciences.
And this has actually made ANAN a preferred premium brand of choice for prospecting accounts, especially for younger people that want to be accountants because, today, having graduated from the university or polytechnic, you still have to go to our College of Accountancy in Jos where you will be trained for nine months, full-time program or 21 months part-time before you write the requisite exam and have practical experience before you can be inducted into the membership of ANAN. So, it is quite a preferred brand; that is why you see ANAN everywhere, in the public and private sectors.
Part of why it is so preferred is because ANAN gives a lot of premium as well to academics as well as practice. It is believed that without theory there cannot be effective practice, you cannot tell us accounting is more practical, what is practical there when there is no theoretical aspect of what you are practicalizing? That is why today when you are talking about academics in Nigeria, conservatively, 60-70% of them in Nigeria are ANAN members.
It is now that our sister body is trying to come in as well in academics to encourage its members to have Masters and PhD. When you now go into the public sector, you find out that we are there like 80%, in private sector, we are trying to get our foothold.
Are you saying that your College and University are what gave ANAN the edge over rival bodies?
It is one of them but because we have the College and University and that makes us the only accountancy professional body in the world that has a university and that takes care of the academics aspect of the accountancy profession. The College takes care of the professional aspect of the accountancy profession for an accountant to become a professional.
One of the banes of this nation has been lack of accountability and transparency in governance. Do you think ANAN has played its role well in changing the narrative?
Yes, I believe that, even though there is always room for improvement in everything that you do, the accountancy profession has done well in that. That is why between ANAN and ICAN, the two professional bodies ensure that its members are trained and retrained on the ethics of the profession. One of the major aspects of the ethics of the profession is transparency and accountability. That is what accountancy is all about and that is what we do. We have various trainings, internationally, and locally that are mandatory for our members.
These are being inculcated in them. You cannot have 100% compliance in terms of what you tell the people to do. In the first instance, people are individualistic in nature and so, whereas you show five people what to do, one may decide not to do it. And of course, the system in which accountants are operating in Nigeria is not friendly, that is why, at some point in time, accountants in Nigeria were asking for hazard allowance as well because, sometimes, they work with a boss who is not an accountant, and it is like the staff function is not a line function because his work is like advisory to his boss.
Do you have a monitoring mechanism to check members’ performance?
We do, we have a specific committee that monitors our members who are in the field. That is why we have Practitioners Forum. And of course they have their own specific training twice a year, one in Abuja and one in Lagos. And, of course, we have a general scheme for members. Members cannot misbehave, if anyone misbehaves he faces an investigative panel, and if he is found wanting by the ANAN[EE1] investigative panel and his case is transferred to the tribunal, the tribunal of ANAN has the status of a Federal High Court, whatever the verdict of that tribunal is it can only be contested at the Court of Appeal.
Tell us about your just concluded 41th AGM and induction of a new President. What has been the impact over the years?
Yes, the new President said he sees himself as the first after 12 and this is the 41st AGM; that is the first after 40. We have had our 40 years of impact, a huge impact. ANAN is, being a professional body in Nigeria, not just accountancy, it has had so huge impact in the past 40 years.
We have a College in a situation where people believed you could not teach accountancy in the classroom in those years and now a university and over 50,000 members in 40 years within the period we have become one of the two biggest accountancy organizations in Africa and the number one accounting professional body recognised in the public sector by the International Federation of Accountants, IFA, having diverse impact.
So, this AGM that we had which was the 41st marked the beginning of a new era, the beginning of the next 40 years that will be much more impactful than the last 40 years in the life of the economy of Nigeria, making Nigeria to be much more prosperous than it is today and, of course, impacting the lives of the members of the Association.
During the investiture of the new President, he made lots of promises and projections of what he intends to achieve. How achievable are those promises?
As the CEO, I am the engine room of the implementation policy direction of the President and the Council. As a membership-based organization, ANAN operates by Council Committee and so, we are going to achieve that by setting up the committee we have 8, 10 members of the committee which will be coordinated by me at the secretariat of the Association. Their responsibility, first and foremost, will be to develop the literature that we will take to universities and polytechnics and we will call it ANAN Club so that every accounting student in tertiary institutions will know about ANAN. ANAN does not force anyone to be its member; we don’t go to schools to accredit their courses. We have been talking about this for a long time, it is wrong for a professional body to start accrediting courses as our sister body does.
It is the responsibility of the National Universities Commission, NUC, to do that. When the NUC wants to go to a particular school to accredit the accounting department, the Commission takes representatives from ANAN, ICAN, other stakeholders and their own staff to do it. But when a professional body goes to accredit a course in a university, that is a slap on the system. The funny thing about this is that the Vice Chancellors of these universities who are supposed to be the implementers of NUC policies also accept it. And so, ANAN does not accredit but we make ourselves known, we tell our story to students, we show them our statistics, what we have been able to do, and where we are going.
We have MoUs with many international accounting professional organizations. In the African Body of Professionals in Africa and Pan Africa Federation of Accountants, we are a major player, especially when you are counting the first five. In ABUA, we are counted as one of the biggest two and in IFAC worldwide, we are in major committees. We show our students these and because students are in the university, it is easier for them to move from the university to our College built on 383 acres (148 hectares) of land, which we call Modern Accountancy Village. On a yearly basis, we have an average intake of 4, 000-5, 000 students both for full-time and part-time programs.
Imagine bringing 1, 000 students who graduated from ABU, UNIBEN, UNILAG, UNN, IFE and state universities, and polytechnics under one roof for nine months, when they share ideas of what they learnt from where they are coming from, that is huge learning in the first instance, apart from the curriculum of the accountancy profession.
These are the things that are in the literature we are taking to the students, developed in pamphlet form, and, when we get to the universities, we share it with them and talk to them about ANAN. We also distribute laptops to their Nigerian University Accountancy Students Association, NUASA, members and we distribute books to them. We also have accounting research centres built by ANAN in 11 universities. We will continue to build more for the students to know more about ANAN.
What is the standard of your College and university?
Our College is called Post-Graduate Professional College in Jos because students come as graduates, just like the Nigerian Law School, and they spend nine months and for the part-time, they spend 21 months and, at the same time, we deploy online lectures for them for five months. ANAN University, it is a university under the control of the NUC. Whatever a normal university does it does.
Challenges?
Our major challenge is funds. If we have funds, we can do much more. Because it is a professional accounting body, it is not funded by government but through members’ subscriptions and training we organise and students’ fees, we raise funds. These funds we have been able to prudently use. But there is no professional body in Nigeria, even in Africa that has assets ANAN has. If you go to our College, it is a multibillion-asset and our university as well is another multi-billion project. But we sponsor ourselves in all of these things.
If we have government funds, and partner funds like major corporations, it will make our impact to be much more felt in every part of Nigeria. Let organizations, well-meaning organizations and government come and see what ANAN is doing so that it can produce more accountants for the prosperity of Nigeria. It does not mean they must give us financial support, it can be the provision of infrastructure. Of course, we have the challenge of managing people.