Since his assumption of office as the Registrar General/CEO of the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) on 7th January, 2020, Alhaji Garba Abubakar has been committed to the full digitization of the Commission.
Digitisation of processes in CAC is the process of converting information into a digital (i.e. computer-readable) format.
Immediately after his appointment, Abubakar, hit the ground running.
Through the unrelenting efforts of his team, the Corporate Affairs Commission has been selflessly committed to sustaining the digitisation of CAC activities, for better service delivery and sourcing of more revenue for the government.
Under his leadership, CAC has vigorously reformed its operations in accordance with global best practices. Work on the deployment of Limited Partnership (LP) and Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) is nearing completion, if not completed already.
How he has managed to retain the jobs of staff members of the Commission, despite the digitisation process of its registry operations, still remains a mystery to many mischievous fellas.
True, technology was taking over manual processes in the Commission, the selfless Registrar General only urged staffers to make themselves relevant to the system.
In view of the ongoing reforms, it was only imperative for non-compliant staff to embrace technology, to enable the Commission to reassign schedules to those that might require on boarding.
Besides the digitisation process, the commission, in 2020 experienced improved revenue, and paid more than N3 billion operating surplus into the federation account and also settled more than N5 billion inherited liabilities, amongst others.
Prior to his assumption of office, the Commission has been spending more than 101% of its revenue on staff cost alone.
Through his efforts, the Commission has prioritised the training, retraining and promotion of staff members.
Interestingly, his background as a law degree holder at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in 1988 has been helpful in formulating policies for the commission. He was called to the bar in 1989. The commission has migrated from the use of Annual Performance Evaluation Review (APER) to Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Experts have described the APER system as subjective and obsolete.
Therefore the Commission’s KPI method is structured into parts A, B, and C, consisting of assessment for the year under review and the upcoming year, amongst others.
The result is the representation of an object, image, sound, document, or signal (usually an analogue signal) by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of points or samples.
Abubakar believes strongly that digitisation is of crucial importance to data processing, storage and transmission because it “allows information of all kinds in all formats to be carried with the same efficiency and also intermingled”.
Until his appointment, he was the Director in charge of Compliance/Litigation at the CAC. He had earlier served as the Special Adviser to the former Registrar General between 2010 and 2017. In that position, he championed the reforms on ease of doing business particularly in the areas of Electronic Registration, Consolidation of Registration Forms, Integration of the CAC Registration Portal with the FIRS Stamp Duty Portal, Reduction of Registration fees, Direct Registration by First Directors/Subscribers as well as the Creation of Public Search Window which provides free information to the public on all entities registered by CAC.
He is also a member of the Financial Services Regulation Coordinating Committee (FSRCC), the National Steering Committee on Open Government Partnership and the Governing Council of the NBA Section on Business Law. He had served on the Governing Boards of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission(EFCC) and the Oil and Gas Free Zones Authority (OGFZA).He was involved in the design of some of the critical reforms in the Corporate and Financial sectors as a member of various committees.
Some of these committees include: Legal Framework Subcommittee of FSS 2020, National Steering Committee on the Establishment of National Collateral Registry, Legal and Enforcement Subcommittee of the FSRCC, National Steering Committee on Harmonisation of Codes of Corporate Governance, Inter Ministerial Committee on AML/CFT, Inter Ministerial Committee on Ease of Doing Business, FSRCC Work Stream 4 on Early Intervention Measures and Crisis Management Continuum On Systemic Financial Crisis in Nigeria as well as In-house Committee on the Re-enactment of the Companies and Allied Matters Act.
Mr. Abubakar had worked with the National Insurance Corporation of Nigeria (NICON) between 1995 and 2004. He resigned in April 2004 as Senior Manager (Perfection & Securitisation) to take up appointment with the CAC. Mr Abubakar was appointed Board Member of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) on the 9th of December, 2019.
Olamide Adeniji is a member of the editorial team of TheScript Newspaper
