As part of efforts to promote good Corporate Governance and ensure the sustainability of enterprises in Nigeria, leading law firm, Kenna Partners, hosted distinguished Board members, company secretaries, regulators, and other senior managers/executives in Nigeria to an interactive breakfast session in Lagos on June 9, 2023.
The breakfast conversations, tagged ‘Reflections on Outcomes-Based Governance’, served as a veritable platform for Regulators and Senior Executives to share their perspectives on a modern approach to corporate governance in Nigeria.
The session was opened with dialogues on insights from the Book ‘Outcomes-based Governance; A Modern Approach to Corporate Governance and eliciting substantial experiences from the distinguished governance experts and authors; Professor Mervyn King, SC, and Professor Fabian Ajogwu, SAN.
How Corporate Governance Evolved
Opening the conversations, Professor Mervyn King, Senior Counsel, and former judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa, gave a brief background to the development of corporate governance, specifically in South Africa.
He stated that the Board of Directors’ focus solely on the interests of shareholders led to a sustainability crisis as companies paid less attention and regard to the stakeholders’ interests.
Professor King, SC, noted that the collapse of the Enron Brothers in the early 2000s and the Global Financial Crisis was a wake-up call to improve how companies were governed from a strictly financial approach to the integration of non-financial metrics.
According to him “the Executives of an organisation are the heart, mind, and conscience of that organisation hence modern corporate Governance should be more mindful”.
Professor Ajogwu, the Senior Partner at Kenna Partners, and a Professor of Corporate Governance, delivered an in-depth analysis of the book, ‘Outcomes-based Governance; A Modern Approach to Corporate Governance’.
He highlighted that the book brings to the fore the steady shift from a focus on the process involved in corporate governance to the expected outcomes of corporate governance.
Source: ThisDay
