..As over 3000 Management Consultants Accredited so far.
As part of efforts to get Management Training Firms and Management Consultants into its accreditation net, the Centre for Management Development(CMD) will in the next two weeks begin electronic accreditation(e-accreditation) as the clampdown on illegal management training institutions and management Consultants gathers momentum.
Director General of the CMD, Dr. Kabir K. Usman dropped the hint in a chat with newsmen in Abuja on the activities of his agency.
He said so far over five hundred (500) management training firms and over three thousand (3000) management consultants have been accredited and more approvals are still being awaited from the office of the Minister of Budget and National Planning.
“All management consultants operating in Nigeria must be accredited and if they are not accredited by CMD, then they are operating illegally”, he said.
He said the CMD works together with the International Standard of Americas and the ones in Europe to make sure that we are delivering training in the standard that is required.
“We have also done quite a lot in terms of accreditation and issues about quality assurance, issues about impact assessment and I really want to emphasize that this is a very important activity to us because some management consultants moving around with briefcase are not doing what they are supposed to do in terms of providing quality training. Some are compromised, but we have ensured that this is not the case. We gave the Carrot and not the Stick to support training agencies with benchmarks, with guidelines, with rules and regulations so that they can operate in a very ethical manner”, he said.
He also noted that management training firms and consultants will no longer have any training programmes approved by the federal government unless such organizations or consultants are duly accredited by the CMD.
On the issue of local content agenda, Dr. Usman said there was a Circular from the Office of the Head of Service that Civil Servants should not just go for overseas training except and unless they got an approval that the kind of training cannot be acquired in Nigeria. So we have been working and trying to see how we can support the Head of Service and also the Sectary to the Government on how this local content agenda can be implemented.
Speaking specifically whether there are sanctions on illegal consultants, he said When he came in 2010, he realized that there was not much the CMD was doing in terms of its regulatory functions of accreditation of management consultants and management development institutions.
“So, I quickly and with vigour established a department of accreditation, curriculum development and quality assurance and appointed a director to head the department. By looking at our mandate it is clear that CMD has the responsibility to check the type of programmes the management consultants are running, the duration of the programmes, the locations of where the programmes are offered, their levels, cost evaluation and value for money”, he said.
He noted that the National Council for Management Development it has one of the highest number of members that you can think of, about 20 members and we don’t have the capacity in terms of funds to sustain that and all we need is not the quantity but the quality and also there was no provision for sanction.
“So if you are a management consultant and not accredited by CMD all we can do is to pursue and convince you to get accredited and see the value for money in the training you are going to undergo. But we are including sanctions in the review of the law establishing the Centre. The act was enacted almost 40 years ago so a lot of things have changed in terms of what we should be asking for and what we should be doing”, he said.
“So now we have difficulties and the only thing we can do is we check if you are not accredited by CMD we will write to you and say you are operating illegally. Some people saw the light. Then we must try and address the issue of lack of enforcement of sanctions. We have to go to the Corporate Affairs Commission and work with them and we have talking to the Federal Inland Revenue Service. So if you want to go and register your management training organization they will ask you have you been accredited by CMD? If you are not, they will not give you the license to practice.
He commended the Offices of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation and that of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation for their supportive roles, adding that “if you want to do a management training for any government agency you must be accredited by the CMD. We went to the universities and told them that their consultancy outfits are existing illegally because they are management development units and even some of the units in faculties of management and social sciences have to be accredited by CMD because there must be a certain level of operation and certain level of ethical code of practice which you must have been embedded in their operations”.
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