Advisory Board

Dr. Christopher Kolade CON - Founding Patron/Chairman of the Advisory Board

Dr. Christopher Kolade, Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON), is the Founding Patron and a Director of the Nigeria Leadership Initiative. He is the Pro-Chancellor, Pan-African University and a member of the governing council.

Dr. Kolade was the Nigerian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom (2002-2007).  He was also the Director-General of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) as well as the Chief Executive, Executive Chairman and Chairman (non-executive) of Cadbury Nigeria Plc.

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria, Fellow, Society of Nigerian Broadcasters, Fellow, Institute of Directors (Nigeria) and has held the Presidency of these and many other professional bodies to which he belonged.  He also sits on the Board of several organisations including the Christopher Kolade Foundation (CKF); Transparency in Nigeria and the Convention on Business Integrity.

Segun Aganga – Founder

Mr. Olusegun Aganga is currently the Minister for Trade and Investment for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Prior to his current portfolio, he distinguished himself as the Minister for Finance. Before being called upon to serve his country, Mr. Aganga was a Managing Director of Goldman Sachs International, London, having meritoriously served, for 22 years, with Ernst & Young, London where he established and led the European Alternative Investment Management Practice. Amongst his other contributions, Mr. Aganga serves on a number of Boards and Committees including Technoserve and The Prince’s Trust Invest in Futures Committee. A Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants (FCA), he was the former Chairman of the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), Prime Brokerage Committee (f. London Investment Banking Association), as well a member of European Commission (EC) Alternative Investment Management Expert Group. Additionally, he served on the Nigerian Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) Technical Committee on Nigerian Capital Market Structure. Mr. Aganga is a Chartered Accountant with degrees from University of Oxford, UK, and University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

He is the founder of the Nigeria Leadership Initiative (NLI).

Aminu Umar Sadiq

Aminu Umar-Sadiq started his career as an Investment Banker with Morgan Stanley International focusing on the Oil & Gas and Power & Utilities sectors. He subsequently became a Private equity investor in Energy & Power with Denham Capital Management, a $4.5Bn commodities-focused private equity firm. He is currently a banker with Societe Generale, advising large cap Metals and Mining companies on corporate finance and M&A transactions. He has also spent some time with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan and Procter & Gamble.

Aminu graduated from the University of Oxford (St John’s College) with an MEng in Engineering Sciences. At Oxford, he co-organised the first pan-African Business conference in conjunction with the Said Business School

Asue Ighodalo

Asue Ighodalo is founding and managing partner of Banwo & Ighodalo, a multidisciplinary firm with offices in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria which provides first-class legal advice on numerous aspects of corporate and commercial Nigerian law. He has a degree in economics from the University of Ibadan, another in Law from the London School of Economics and was admitted into the Nigerian Bar in July 1985. Asue sits on the boards of public and private companies and NGOs including the Christopher Kolade Foundation, Dangote Flour Mills Plc, FATE Foundation, Main Street Technologies Limited, the Nigerian Economic Summit Group and Union Bank UK Plc.

Bola Adesola

Bola Adesola is the Managing Director of Nigeria’s Standard Chartered Bank Plc. Mrs. Adesola was a former Executive Director, Corporate Banking at First Bank of Nigeria Plc. A seasoned financial services expert, Mrs. Adesola had been Managing Director/Chief Executive of Kakawa Discount House Limited, a company she successfully repositioned from an essentially mono-product profile into a multi product enterprise. She spent nine years in Citibank Nigeria (Nigeria International Bank, a member of Citigroup). She was also part of the start-up team for Citibank, Tanzania, Dar es Salaam where she served as pioneer Treasurer. Called to the Nigerian Bar in 1985, Bola holds a law degree from the University of Buckingham, UK and has attended numerous industry-related and personal development courses in Nigeria and overseas. She is also an honorary member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, Nigeria.

Dr. Titi Banjoko

Dr. Titi Banjoko is a Senior Research Associate at UK’s Foreign Policy Centre, member of the Migrant Advisory Board of the European Commission-United Nations Joint Migration and Development Initiative and Director of the AfricaRecruit programme. She sits on numerous boards including the selection panel on the International Health Links Funding Scheme (UK), the Department for International Development, the Global Poverty Action Fund, as well as a steering group on the Africa-UK project. She is also currently a healthcare manager in the NHS on the 2012 Olympic-Paralympics in London. Dr. Banjoko has over 15 years experience working on capacity building and diaspora initiatives.

Bridget Itsueli

A certified counsellor and mediator, Mrs. Itsueli is a Management Consultant, Director of the Lagos Resource Centre and National Co-coordinator, Marriage and Family Life Committee of the Catholic Bishops Conference. In addition to these roles, she is a member of Faculty of the Abuja-based Lux Terra Leadership Foundation – a multiple resource outfit and training facility whose purpose is to expose both current and potential leaders to the dynamics of purposeful, visionary, transformative and inspiring servant leadership. She is also an honorary member of the Congo-based BIDIA: Bibliotheque Pour Le Development Integral de l’afrique (BIDIA).

Dapo Olagunji

Dapo Olagunji is the Group Treasurer of Access Bank Plc where he is charged with designing and implementing the treasury business strategy across various geographies where the bank maintains a presence (nine sub-Saharan African countries and the United Kingdom).  He is a member of the inter-functional team that created the bank’s Sustainable Banking Initiative – the integration of environmental and social considerations into the bank’s core business. He had also worked in a four-man consultancy team with a mandate from the General Assembly of the UN vide its Resolution A/RES/60/278 where he helped develop the organizational structure and decision-making procedure which is being followed in the formulation, approval and administration of peacekeeping financing budgets at the UN. A qualified accountant, Dapo was an SBS Scholar at the University of Oxford where he received an MBA. He sits on the board of Education as a Vaccine, a non-profit organization that was established to reduce the rising incidence of HIV/AIDS.

Dele Olojede

Dele Olojede is the Executive Chairman of Timbuktu Media. He has over 25 years of extensive experience in journalism. He is the former Foreign Editor for New York Newsday where he worked until 2004. He founded Timbuktu Media later that year after relocating temporarily to South Africa. In 2005, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his retrospective on Rwanda a decade after the genocide.

Jacobs Moyo Ajekigbe

Mr. Jacobs Ajekigbe, former Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of First Bank of Nigeria Plc, holds a B.Sc degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Ibadan (1975), a Certificate in Investment Planning and Appraisal from the University of Bradford, UK (1981) as well as MBA degree in Finance from the University of Lagos. He joined First Bank of Nigeria Plc as a graduate trainee in 1977 and rose through the ranks to become the Managing Director/CEO of the Bank in 2002. His 32 years of banking experience cuts across Agricultural Financing, Branch Banking Operations, Corporate Banking, Retail and Consumer Banking and General Management. Between 1993 and 2000, he served at the London Branch of First Bank, first as Deputy Manager and later as Branch Manager. He was appointed Executive Director in December 2000, and appointed Managing Director/CEO on April 22, 2002. He retired in December 2008 after completing two terms in office. Mr. Jacobs Ajekigbe was Chairman, Kakawa Discount House Limited and FBN Merchant Bankers Limited. He also sat on the boards of FBN Bank (UK) Limited, First Pension Custodian Limited, Vee Network Ltd (now Zain), and Transnational Corporation Nigeria Plc. He is the Chairman, Board of Directors, FrieslandCampina WAMCO Nigeria Plc and Chairman, Governing Council, Baptist Theological Seminary, Ogbomoso. He has attended a number of courses both in Nigeria and abroad, the latest of which were “Making Corporate Boards More Effective” and “Leadership Best Practices” both at Harvard Business School Boston, USA.

Jinmi Morgan

Jinmi Morgan is a chartered accountant who has worked in the UK and Nigeria, with 15 years experience working on employment programmes and on capacity building initiatives. He has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Black Londoners School Governors and Parents Forum, the Greenwich Strategic Local Partnership, Shoreditch Business Forum (City Fringe) and Haggerston Community Forum. He is a member of the Reconstituted Presidential Task Force on Customs Reform, Nigeria. Jinmi currently works as founding member of Temple Crest, a financial services advisory and assurance boutique. Prior to that he worked at 3T Consulting and Ernst & Young. He was awarded a life membership of the Society for Aid to the Disabled, an NGO to assist disabled soldiers of the ‘Biafran’ war, at the end of his National Youth Service Corp year. Jinmi has initiated mutually beneficial engagement between Africa and Asia, one of which is CABS – China Awareness and Business Seminar.

Maryam Uwais

Mrs. Maryam Uwais is currently the Managing Partner of the Law Firm of Wali-Uwais & Co. Prior to her current engagement at Wali-Uwais & Co., she worked at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) from where retired from public service. A former prosecutor with the Kano State Ministry of Justice, Mrs. Uwais was also a member of the Nigerian Law Reform Commission. Amongst her numerous outstanding contributions, to the Nigerian nation and society, were membership on the Boards of several organisations and civil society groups, notably: the National Human Rights Commission (where she was a Special Rapporteur on Child Rights); LEAP Africa; Youth Business Initiative; Women in Successful Careers (WISCAR); the National Consultative Committee on Justice Sector Reform; the Working Group on Fiscal Responsibility Law; the Justice Research Institute; Coalition Against Tobacco; Nigerian Investment Climate Advisory Council; Technical Committees of the Constitutional Reform Dialogue Mechanism and the Gender and Affirmative Action Coalition; and the African Union Committee on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.

Mrs. Uwais was also a founding member of the Nigerian Chapter of Musawah, a Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family. Moreover, Mrs. Uwais, through consultancy work, has lent her technical expertise of various issues and projects on children & women’s rights, entrepreneurship, education and justice sector reform. She has consulted for Open Society Initiative for West Africa [OSIWA], the United Nations Children Education Fund [UNICEF], the World Bank, and UK’s Department of Foreign Investment and Development [DFID]. Some of her writings included several papers and articles on rights (economic, social and cultural), child justice administration, children and women’s rights (especially on the misapplication of Sharia law in Northern Nigeria), and interfaith dialogue.

Nasir El-Rufai

He was the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory and member of the Federal Executive Council, the highest decision making body in Nigeria from 2003 – 2007. He attended various academic and professional programmes at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, University of London, Harvard Business School, Arthur D. Little School of Management in Massachusetts, Georgetown University School of Foreign Services in Washington, D.C. and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He established and ran what became a successful consulting practice, el-Rufai & Partners, between 1982 and 1998. He also held management positions with two international telecommunications companies, AT&T Network Systems International BV and Motorola, Inc. In October 2001, he was conferred a national honour, OFR (Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic of Nigeria) by the Federal Government of Nigeria while serving as the director general of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) and the secretary of the National Council of Privatisation where he spearheaded the privatisation of many government owned companies. In 2005, he was conferred D.Sc (honoris causa) by the University of Abuja, Nigeria.

Prof. Femi Oyebode

Femi Oyebode is Professor and Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Prof. Jacob Olupona

Jacob K. Olupona, who joined the Faculty of Divinity and Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2006, is a noted scholar of indigenous African religions who came to Harvard from the University of California, Davis. His current research focuses on the religious practices of the estimated one million Africans who have emigrated to the United States over the last 40 years, examining in particular several populations that remain relatively invisible in the American religious landscape: “reverse missionaries” who have come to the U.S. to establish churches, African Pentecostals in American congregations, American branches of independent African churches, and indigenous African religious communities in the U.S. His earlier research ranged across African spirituality and ritual practices, spirit possession, Pentecostalism, Yoruba festivals, animal symbolism, icons, phenomenology, and religious pluralism in Africa and the Americas. In his forthcoming book Ile-Ife: The City of 201 Gods, he examines the modern urban mixing of ritual, royalty, gender, class, and power, and how the structure, content, and meaning of religious beliefs and practices permeate daily life. He has authored or edited eight other books, including, most recently, Òrìsà Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture, co-edited with Terry Rey. His Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals has become a model for ethnographic research among Yoruba-speaking communities. Olupona has received prestigious grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Ford Foundation, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Getty Foundation. He has served on the editorial boards of three influential journals and as president of the African Association for the Study of Religion. In 2000, Olupona received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and in 2007 he received the Nigerian National Order of Merit, that country’s prestigious award given each year for intellectual accomplishment in the four areas of science, medicine, engineering/technology, and humanities.

Senator Udo Udoma

Udoma Udo Udoma is the senior, and founding, partner in the commercial law firm of Udo Udoma & Belo-Osagie whose main office is in Lagos, with branches in Port Harcourt, Abuja and Uyo. He is the immediate past Chairman of the Nigerian Securities & Exchange Commission and recently served as the Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Waivers, Incentives and Concessions. He was in the Nigerian Senate for two terms (1999 – 2003) and (2003 – 2007). Whilst there, he served as the Vice Chairman Foreign Affairs Committee (1999 – 2001), Chairman of the Appropriation Committee (2001 – 2003), and as the Senate Chief Whip (2004 – 2007). Whilst in the Senate he also served as the leader of the South-South caucus of the Senate, leader of the Akwa Ibom State Legislators Forum, member of the National Caucus of the P.D.P, and member of the National Executive Committee of the P.D.P.. As a senator he piloted the Bill to Abrogate the On-shore/Off-shore Dichotomy in Revenue Allocation through the Senate and till it was signed into law by the then President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, in 2004. He is currently serving as the Deputy Chairman of the Presidential Committee on the Review of the Nigerian Constitution.

He attended King’s College, Lagos from 1966 to 1972 and after his ‘A’ levels he was admitted to Oxford University, England where he obtained a B.A. (Law) degree (1976) and the postgraduate B.C.L. degree in jurisprudence (1977). He was called to the Nigerian Bar (1978), after obtaining the B.L. degree at the Nigerian Law School.

His legal expertise includes company law, banking & finance, securities law and capital market transactions. He also has some expertise in constitutional law, and in natural resources law. He is the Chairman of UAC of Nigeria Plc and is on the board of some other Nigerian companies including FHN Nigeria Limited, Linkage Assurance Plc. and Unilever Nigeria Plc.

Up until 2000, Udoma was a director of the Economic Summit Group, a private sector think-tank that, amongst other things, organizes the annual Nigerian Economic Summit where the heads of the major private sector organizations meet with senior Government officials to stimulate economic development and growth.

He has served in several other public roles such as being the legal member of the Working Committee that implemented the first Nigerian LNG project, the legal member of the Presidential Committee on the Development of a Solid Minerals Policy, a member of the Legal Advisory Committee of the Technical Committee on Privatisation and Commercialisation, the first Chairman of the Corporate Affairs Commission, Abuja and as Special Adviser to the Minister of Petroleum, amongst others. He is also regularly consulted by both Federal and State Governments on various issues, including legal problems relating to the exploitation of crude oil, natural gas and other natural resources and the related problem of revenue allocation between the different levels of Government. He is a recipient of several honours including Hon. LLD, University of Uyo, and the national honour of Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON).