Minister of Trade and Investment, Okechukwu Enelamah's close associates control Apostles in the Market Place, AiMP, a leading 'Christian' organisation devoted to integrity and ethics in the market place. I know, I have attended quite a few sessions. The preaching is good.

When he was appointed, it was good vibes for the stomach - mine - that at least some of the talk could try out its legs - on the actual terrains of life, at the highest policy level, walking.

Many months ago, the linked report below says he as supervising Minister for the Financial Reporting Council tried to suffocate the first Code developed to prod leaders of nonprofit organisations to do the needful: run those bodies within the minimum expectations of the law and order driven society they serve primarily. That report was troubling: what happened yesterday - the cold-blooded destruction of the FRC leadership for daring to ask nonprofits including religious ones to step up to the plate ethically - is the very definition of more than troubling.

That Code, mind you, was not developed in Secret. For so many years, there has been concerted effort to find a way to develop an acceptable code for the nonprofit sector. Many Institutions including the Lagos Business School/Pan-African (now Pan-Atlantic) University in fact, facilitated several forums aimed at distilling such a Code. One of my senior friends even tried to establish a nonprofit institute, social sector magazine and an annual Nonprofit Awards devoted to standards setting in that circuit.

Everyone, I think I remember, publicly claimed it was more than due: privately, it was another matter. And the result, was that somehow, regardless of the massive mobilisations by very intelligent and super-connected people, the Code just never seemed to become a done deal.

WHAT exactly was wrong with the 'new' Code that now seems to be no more than another statistics in the still-birth graveyard?

Its objective is the well flogged one: fostering “a transparent decision-making process in which the leadership of a non-profit organisation, in an effective and accountable way, directs resources and exercises power on the basis of shared values”.

It's final development was a product of an additional directive given to the Steering Committee on the National Code of Corporate Governance on 29th November 2013 by the Honourable Minister of Trade and Investment whose mandated remit to the committee was to extend corporate governance to Not-For-Profit Organisations (NFPOs) in Nigeria.

It was the product of a panel of an executive body - which can be engaged if, as is always the case, some things were perceived to need some review or fine-tuning. There is more than enough room to have that Code evolve: religious bodies, especially RCCG which Pastors control both the Supervising Ministry, several other cabinet posts and the Vice-Presidency of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has more than enough clout, electoral nuisance value due to its wide-spread membership and raw influence to push a review through legitimately and legally. So, why the brutal high-handedness?

I think, this was meant to send a message: that religious nonprofits are untouchables and shall do as they please. In essence, leaders of religious nonprofits are claiming the same above-the-law status as Nigeria's political leaders .

I can see why the Mega-Politicians and the Mega-Pastors love each other a lot. Magu of EFCC got thrown out of a job by the Politicians in High Places for trying to do the job as required. The man at FRC has lost his job for trying to do his job by Pastors in -or with connections - in High Places. Twin heads of endemic corruption fighting back.

Interestingly, sponsors of religious nonprofit organisations had the unfettered option and liberty of running their bodies within the informal sector regulated by no other than Divinity, Heaven and the Holy Spirit. But? They chose to recruit carnal lawyers with carnal LL.B, BL to go to the Corporate Affairs Commission of Nigeria to get their 'Churches' registered as Incorporated Trustees under the Nigerian Legal System. By doing that, they gained access to so many carnal privileges of Mammon the laws of Nigeria grants to nonprofits. Some have gone far and above as to attract and keep illegitimate benefits to themselves beyond what the law envisaged by virtue of such registration with temporal man-made legal system.

However, wherever the Law imposes some reasonable demands globally acknowledged as promoting accountability and transparency, they scream foul - and tout separation of Church and State or Spiritual Sovereignty (whatever that means).

Again, it is not just the 'Churches': the religious nonprofits are just the convenient effigies of all the others who use the status to access both local and international funds, assets, platforms, connections and influence. That is, all the family-based, husband and wife or sole-proprietorship, political-positioning, influence-peddling or ego-massaging 'foundations', 'advocacy' initiatives, 'human rights' bodies, 'enterprise' development platforms and 'socio-cultural' or 'grassroot mobilisation' entities. Most of these bodies exist to use the law to build their muscles so as neutralize the law and become laws unto themselves secured by rents delivered by the same law directly or indirectly. And because they have somehow brow-beaten the system, there are literally thousands of them being presented for registration every week at the CAC - confident that registration would be their only run-in with any sort of legal regulation from the cowardly or negligent law gate-keepers.

Law reports do not lie and cases upon cases show unending succession crises, lack of succession planning and scant regard for the legal implication of registration as an incorporated trustee. From the issues regularly ventilated in those cases, you cannot but come away ruing the self-inflicted moral and ethical handicaps of Nigeria's nonprofit circuit which has ensured that it continues to share the inglorious honour of not being able to deliver no more than a handful of indigenously originated generational organisations: ones which outlast their founders to the third generation and still thrive. Meanwhile, its massive but almost untouched capacity for nation-building and lives-dignifying impact remain barely scratched besides the surface. The surface of membership mobilisation, media/brand recognition and wealth mobilisation.

2017 was the first time a Code has seen the light of Day, at least, for 24 hours to provide some minimum guidelines aimed at providing some quasi-regulatory suggestions for nonprofits - to help steer them away from the perception of being synonymous with abuses and corruption. Apart from being associated with such villainies as money laundering, tax-evasion schemes, asset-squirreling and custom/import duties evasion cartels - religious nonprofit in Nigeria have over the years also become one more hub for conflict generation to clog up the courts instead of being conflict resolving entities as expected. Again a little research of cases involving nonprofits, religious or otherwise, show that the vast majority involve banal disputes over properties and assets - their ownership or control. Centers that ought to be peace makers and developers of community based Justices of the Peace are shown to be demonstrably incapable of dealing with basic disputes among its members due to authoritarian and autocratic leadership structure which abnegates meaningful engagement and conflict detection/resolution efforts between leadership and members.

The biggest losers may yet be those who tonight may be celebrating their 'victory' over the ousted FRC leadership.

There is a reason Boko Haram happened. There is a reason why Reverend King happened. Religious leaders who refuse to embrace reasonable ethical demands of their offices in a demonstrable accountable and transparent manner cannot be blameless when others take their scant disregard for the law to its logical conclusions.

http://insidebusinessonline.com/index.php/2016/10/05/buhari-stops-enelamahs-sack-frc-boss/

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