TheCable

A daunting task welcomed Alhaji Garba Abubakar upon assumption of office as the registrar general of the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) in January 2020. He was faced with the challenge of turning around the fortune of the then 30-year-old establishment. He had been specifically aware that the office was in dire need of digitalisation towards achieving efficiency.

Rather than being overwhelmed by the challenge, Abubakar took it head-on. There was a need for the CAC to delist about 100,000 companies from its database, having not updated their records from the commission. Many had thought this an impossible task. But he adopted a pragmatic effort at achieving it by first issuing a warning to the erring companies to comply or get delisted accordingly. Not a few companies had complied promptly to save themselves from being delisted. But it was the beginning of the revolution that would be far-reaching.

The digitalisation had faced strenuous opposition when it was first launched. But the reason was not far-fetched. Touts who had constituted themselves into nuisance at the CAC headquarters in Abuja, purporting to help company owners to effect registration had felt disconnected from their livelihood, as it were. Some of the touts included lawyers who had constituted themselves as “third parties” as well as some unscrupulous staffers of the commission. Together they had deprived the CAC of generating targeted revenue for the government. For Abubakar, battling against the “third parties” had become a battle for survival for the commission and specifically for him. He won the battle in the end, returning long-sought sanity to the commission and generally sanitising the entire system.

As revolutionary as Abubakar was during their tenure, he never for once exercised authority outside the commission’s Act of 1990. For instance, despite calls from some quarters that the commission should open offices in the 774 local government areas of the country, he insisted the law must be adhered to in the strictest terms, that is, only in all the states’ capitals must there be the CAC offices, with only two offices in the federal capital. As far as he was concerned, providing an enabling environment for businesses to thrive was the most important factor for his administration. Before 2020, it was the norm for companies to fill out the forms and get lawyers to submit it at the CAC, onward review and approval before letters of acknowledgement were issued. This became history after Abubakar came on board, as an electronic entity account was created for use by the companies. He made bold to say that there is yet no agency in Nigeria that has a self-service portal in the manner that the CAC operated during his tenure, which enabled the applicants to access the portal from anywhere in the world.

Although Abubakar also was humble enough to admit that the CAC he superintended wasn’t a perfect system, he nonetheless made bold to say that the transition from manual registry to fully automated registry is one of the fastest in the world and that although it took the United Kingdom to achieve the same feat in four years, Nigeria achieved its within three years. In tandem with technological evolution, the CAC also ensured that its customer service unit operated on full scale while the entire customer management system was deployed to address urgent concerns from the customers. Not a few were unanimous that this improvement was phenomenal, compared to the analogue era that preceded the pre-2020 era.

Abubakar’s success wasn’t happenstance in any way, it has to be stated. Not many knew that he had been part of the CAC since 2004 as an insider, which enabled him to study the operations under several registrar generals with a view to developing his own ideas of moving the commission forward should an opportunity come along. Little wonder, when the opportunity came in 2020, he hit the ground running and left no one in doubt of his resolve that has now been widely acclaimed as unprecedented in the 33-year history of the commission.

Confounded critics latched on to the result-oriented style of Abubakar, branding him a “dictator”, “arrogant”, “evil”, etc. But he was far from being deterred.

Before 2020, a year hardly passed at the CAC without unnecessary bickering, strikes and demonstrations, even though the actions were without apparent justification. Industrial harmony was a tall order and nobody appeared to give any consideration to the anomaly. But Abubakar committed himself fully to harmony among the workforce. Having met arrears of unremitted pension contribution of staff and taxes to the tune of over N5 billion, he and his team worked tirelessly to ensure that the arrears were cleared, in addition to statutory obligations being settled as at when due, arrears of operating surplus due to government settled while paying the current one. Aside from financial stability being achieved, accountability was also ensured. Pre-2020, all the money made was spent on staff salaries. But post-2020, it was brought down to 59 per cent. At the time Abubakar was relieved of his duties on October 13 2023, the target had been set down to 40 per cent, even as all bills had been paid with no one being owed after all the leakages had been blocked with the electronic system in place.

With all the foregoing, the onus is now on Abubakar’s successor and fellow senior advocate, Alhaji Hussaini Ishaq Magaji, to further the cause of the CAC in the years ahead. Abubakar has run his own race and can look back with pride as he heads to his next endeavour.