HSENations reported back in May, that the Institute of Safety Professionals of Nigeria (ISPON) was on the cusp of achieving lasting peace after three warring parties signed a communique committing to reconciliation in a process midwifed by the House of Representatives Committee on Safety Standards and Regulations.
On June 21, that process became threatened when the Engr. Timothy Iwuagwu-led Governing Board of the institute announced its withdrawal from the reconciliation, citing the committee’s alleged bias and official factionalisation of ISPON.
Reacting, Deputy Chairman of the House Committee and Chairman of the Caretaker/Transition Committee tasked with resolving the ISPON crisis, Hon. (Barr.) Harrison Nwadike said the reconciliation process would continue even without the participation of Iwuagwu-led ISPON.
In this interview held at the ISPON National Secretariat in Ikotun, Lagos on Saturday, July 13, Engr. Timothy Iwuagwu explains to HSENations’ John Ogunsemore the rationale behind the withdrawal and the way forward for lasting peace in ISPON. Excerpt…
Why did you pull out from the reconciliation process at the House of Representatives Committee on Safety Standards and Regulations?
We pulled out from the reconciliation process because of certain things that we took note of that were totally at variance and inconsistent with the agreement initially reached. I’ve heard people talk about an MoU, saying we signed an MoU but now won’t follow it.
We signed an MoU and not a death warrant. And the MoU was signed among civilised and knowledgeable people, among sound minds.
We did not expect that along the line it would be marred by insincerity, manipulations, and of course anyone capable of such manipulations must have had it in their minds that they were dealing with unschooled minds.
We agreed that all the parties to that reconciliation should submit everything that legitimises their position or claims.
That is from the outset, as of March 13, 2024.
We – the institute’s Registrar, Nasarawa State Coordinator, and President – sat down and had real time interactive session with the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Safety Standards and Regulations and when we interacted extensively, we were told to bring the list of the Board of Trustees under the old organisation called Nigerian Institute of Safety Professionals (NISP).
We were also asked to bring the names of those Board members of the new Institute of Safety Professionals of Nigeria (ISPON) as established by Act No. 2 of 2014. We were also asked to bring the list of current Board Members of ISPON.
There was an ISPON as at the date we went there and there is still the same ISPON up till now that I am talking. That same ISPON that was asked to bring a list of its Board members suddenly became a faction from the blues. That thing came up initially on Tuesday, May 7, 2024.
That was the first day we saw it clearly written in a paper addressing everybody as faction but we sensed something like that when, at the end of my interactive session with the Chairman of the House Committee on Safety Standards and Regulations, the letter of appreciation given to me at the end of that day did not bear the title ‘President’.
But I was appreciated – there was an appreciation for my team and me – for the great insight we had thrown into ISPON issues.
And of course, that was the insight that made them to understand what was going on in the institute.
This whole process was initiated by the institute.
Why did we go there?
A lot of people are still unwilling to read and understand the reason we went there was that on the October 31, 2023, I got elected as President of this institute with other colleagues of mine who contested for different positions of the Governing Board. 10 of them.
And another person who contested as Deputy President. It will interest you to know that what led to the election that produced me as President was due to disobedience of law and order by the immediate-past president.
I personally notified him that his tenure was running out and he should quickly do an election and did not need to do the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of 2023.
He needed to have done an AGM/Election in April 2023 but he was interested in toeing the line of lawlessness.
He told all of us that the expelled members told him not to do election, that they have all agreed to continue running ISPON without the Act because the Act says two years from the date of the last election (another election must hold) but not more than that.
You may decide to do it earlier but not later than two years from the date of the last election.
The last election that brought him in and he went to court to affirm it and it was affirmed that the commencement date was April 9, 2021. By April 8, 2023, was exactly two years.
He was told after the AGM of October 2022, when I was in Abuja with him, that don’t you think this thing is a miscalculation?
You shouldn’t have done this thing in October.
You should have just waited till April next year and you’ll do your AGM. And he said it didn’t matter. In his own words, ‘It doesn’t matter at all’.
We all relaxed to see what he wanted to do.
He did AGM in October 2022 and if he wanted to do another AGM it could as well be April 2023 but we were watching, hoping he would do so because anything short of that becomes ultra vires the law. But to him there’s no court in Nigeria.
There was no Act in ISPON and he could just decide.
He even threatened to sack some Board members on his own, undermining process and procedure but all these ended in what the whole people have refused to even appreciate.
We are not interested in those who cannot read any language because if you’re writing and sending to them, you are just wasting your time.
What we are saying is that somebody violated the law and a court of competent jurisdiction ruled on October 27, 2023, that the man who has been occupying the seat has actually ended his tenure as of April 8, 2023.
And as at the time the court ruled, he was still parading himself as president, and he told some people that he was actually inaugurated on October 26, 2023. Some people said maybe he wanted to use the inauguration date and not the election date. The Act did not care about when you decide to inaugurate.
It’s the election date that the Act is talking about. We said okay, let’s assume he has written a new Act, so he is going to do an election on or before October 26, 2023.
He couldn’t have done it on October 26. He was supposed to do it on October 25 if he was going by two years from inauguration. But we only know two years from election, which is April 8.
Two years from inauguration is October 25. He didn’t do election October 25, 26, or 27.
By October 27, a court ruled that he is not supposed to be on that seat. Not just him. The court did not mention him but said the entire Board. He is the Chairman of the Board.
We said, ‘Okay sir, you are also free to contest in the election that is coming up.’ The court specifically said the election should hold on October 31, 2023.
The court said the venue of that election should be at the National Secretariat of the institute at Ikotun, Lagos which is known as Dominic Aigbogun House, 46 Ikotun-Isolo Road, in Egbe Town, Ikotun here where we are currently talking in this interview.
That’s the institute’s headquarters.
But because he has vowed not to obey the law, he deceived a lot of mostly educated people, including professors. Somebody was even making jest of us saying it seems some of your people went to get Ph.D. and the course they read is ignorance.
That is, they went to acquire ignorance as an area of speciality, otherwise why did they follow this man to disobey the law? Couldn’t they have even corrected him, because a leader could make mistake.
It is everybody’s duty to correct him. Some people showed me the mail they sent to him just like I sent to him long before this time to tell him he was going off the line.
He said he didn’t want to hear that. Even his deputy left him. The deputy even went to Abuja to tell him not to do this thing (election) there.
The deputy told him, ‘The law says we should do it at Ikotun and the law said all of us as a Board (I was not in their Board) has no right to organise the election.’
The court said it’s the election committee that organised the election that brought him to power that should conduct another election on the grounds that he had no mandate by law anymore and that electoral committee was not disbanded, so it was still a standing committee.
That committee conducted election in 2017.
So the question is, why did the man disobey?
When he was asked, he said expelled members who are no more members of ISPON are the ones directing him. So many people got shocked.
They told him he shouldn’t do election and they should continue violating the laws of the nation.
They said if they continued like that, the Act would no longer be the instrument.
Maybe they would have written their own, and even the National Assembly was no more of relevance. That court judgement that came on October 27 was communicated to the president then and when he got it, he sent it to their lawyer and the lawyer asked him to disregard it, that it is a mere letter.
Maybe he thought it’s a love letter or congratulatory message for the illegal conference and AGM he was organising at Abuja.
The court said do it here in Lagos.
It was very terrible when we came to understand that he asked the former Registrar, Mr Bola Aborode to send money to the security man here to go and hire policemen to stop members from coming to vote but members were already here.
He quickly said he was doing election at Abuja but there was no election on October 31.
The programme of the conference/AGM he organised in Abuja clearly carried it that the election would be held on Wednesday, November 1, 2023.
So how did he almost in the evening of October 31 now call some people in for an election?
How can you say only 10 people contested for 10 seats and say that’s an election in an institute of this number?
So there was no room for choice because the word ‘choice’ connotes a multiplicity of options.
In that case, he just took names of people including those that were in Lagos attending the court-ordered election and put their names. He even put me as Coordinator for Lagos whereas he told the whole world that I was no more Coordinator for Lagos. He quickly packaged something.
Some of the people he uploaded their pictures wrote letters to the institute – we have up to four letters written by those people – warning him not to put their names in anything that is against the law. He published the names.
I emerged as President in Lagos.
Dr. Martin Dike emerged as Deputy President in Lagos. Alhaji Suleiman Dankoli emerged as Board Member in Lagos. Suleiman Dankoli did not go to Abuja but this man put his name there that he was in Abuja.
They even told police here in Lagos weeks after the election that I was in Abuja for the election whereas I never got close to the airport or any bus terminal. We were all here and did election here. The election, they said do it physical or virtual or both.
Some people who couldn’t come were also communicating.
The electorate could call on phone and once they confirmed their preferred candidate, their choice was ticked.
So what’s the problem?
Should we all follow the bandwagon and disobey the law?
What would be the public’s opinion of the institute and the sensibilities of all the people that say they are occupying positions of responsibility here?
That is why I don’t like to mention anything about the last Board because the last Board was totally dragged into the pit by the Chairman of the Board who doubled as the President of the institute.
What we are talking about is that the court judgement also directed the Inspector-General of Police to support this Board that I am leading to take over all assets and everything of the institute. It is clearly written. But that president refused to hand over the account.
Up till now we are using Lagos State account because I felt we should not have multiplicity of accounts everywhere.
Already there are criminal activities where expelled members were also opening accounts, deceiving members of the public who are registering and paying because those accounts bore the institute’s name whereas those accounts are fictitious accounts.
So you can see people who can expose this professional body to ridicule by their bad character.
The Act says one of the qualifications to be a member is that you must be of good character.
That aside, why we decided to pull out of this process which we initiated is that we saw that the lawmaking body that asked us to bring the judgements, having said they did not know there was any judgement, and I confirmed there were on March 13, 2024.
I even joked that I would bring the court judgements to them in a wheelbarrow.
We spent money that would have been used for something else. We even produced the 10-count criminal charges with which the Federal Republic of Nigeria charged all these expelled members for using ISPON’s name to defraud members of the Nigerian public.
They are on bail as we speak. Even when we have presented all these things, each of those documents was about 900 pages and we produced 12 copies each and gave about six copies to the National Assembly.
They threw it away because that did not suit their purpose as they had a predetermined position which we did not know.
The judgement of 2018 where the court said these people are not executives of ISPON, and we expelled them after efforts to get them to come back failed.
They were expelled by the Governing Board. I was not a member of the Governing Board at that time.
There was a joint meeting between the Governing Board and the Coordinators, where the decision was taken that since these people were not willing to come back, they were hereby expelled. It was a communique that was released, signed and published in Guardian newspaper.
They went to court to counter it and the case ended on February 17, 2022. They lost the case.
The court said they stood expelled, that the man Benson Adam-Otite who was sacked as Registrar for sabotaging the institute, for announcing an Emergency General Meeting (EGM) which people attended when the court had ruled that nobody should go.
Some people attended and that is why we have a long list of expelled members because they also violated since the court said they should not go.
They followed Adam-Otite and for following him, wherever he falls into, they will share in that identity. These guys are our friends and colleagues.
How they came to become monsters remains a big surprise although we have been seeing some body language.
I don’t want to go into that because it will amount to unnecessary storytelling. Anyone interested can contact the court judgements which are so comprehensive and explicit.
The guys who followed that man for that fictitious gathering against the Governing Board’s directive and order of court stand expelled. They were served papers.
It was not by fiat. Their names were published but none responded because some persons who claimed to be the godfathers of the institute said they should not obey the thing.
That’s what is going on now – impunity.
A member of the 10th House of Representatives, who was also in the Ninth Assembly, was among the people in their board. Their board is endless. It is still on. They said their board started April 20, 2021, and it is still on until today.
We were now shocked that the House of Reps Committee on Safety Standards and Regulations did not even ask them to stop what they were doing.
They said everybody should continue until we do another election.
Now, how did we come about the word election for October?
It’s because of my tenure. I was asked when my tenure commenced and I said October 31, 2023.
They said, ‘Okay. What if we have election October 2024?’ I said I was ready to sacrifice one year of my tenure.
I said it publicly and it was also in an interview you held with me sometime ago because ISPON is not my property.
I will stand down on one condition: that these people will obey the law.
They are known for contempt of court judgements. We expected that they would respect my commitment.
ISPON, the President of ISPON and the Board of ISPON, by that my position that day meant that would all give way for an election that would encompass even unworthy people, people currently facing 10-count criminal charges. People who were suspended for some years before their expulsion.
These people cannot continue like this and are we supposed to be embracing lawlessness?
The shock that made us to pull out fast was that even the thing that was not written in the communique, they started implementing it with speed. A lot of people that have been in hiding from police arrest all these years were given energy.
They resurrected from wherever they were hiding and came to the public, sitting majestically at the House of Reps. They started dictating that we should submit all ISPON property.
Expelled people were now marshalling others.
A letter was sent to me asking me to submit the code to the government-assigned website and all the bank coordinates of the institute. These expelled people, nobody asked them to submit anything.
They just gave them vaguely; they never submitted anything. We were even told to withdraw all pending court cases. I was the first to withdraw.
They gave us until June 21 to withdraw all pending court cases and I withdrew middle of May and showed it to the whole people.
I was watching. Nobody among them withdrew a single case and the House members were very comfortable with that.
And you believe we should go on with that process that is already skewed and jaundiced? We were not supposed to do that if we must save the soul of this institute.
We decided not to do that and when we now did a re-appraisal of what they have been doing, we found out that they were not ready or willing to obey the content of the MoU or communique.
In one of your interviews, you asked me if I thought or believed this thing (reconciliation) would work.
I answered and said with sincerity of purpose it would work. I told you I believed it would work because I didn’t believe anyone would see the sincerity we had put on the table and try to mess it up but these people went to muddle it up.
When I pulled out the court case, I told our legal team to pull out our pending case at the Federal High Court and the case was removed.
When I showed it, one of them, Yusuf Malgwi, applauded me saying ‘Oh, this is good’, on the WhatsApp group we shared with National Assembly members.
Soon after he wrote that thing, his co-expelled people ganged up on him for appreciating me and he quickly deleted it.
Don’t you think by that action, even the communique that said all should remove all pending court cases, they have nothing to do with it?
They neither removed any court case nor applauded anyone who did. We kept quiet and were taking note. I called Adam-Otite and asked him why Mr. Malgwi removed the thing he wrote.
He said it was Malgwi’s personal decision but he was tactless enough when he said that he did not regard that as something worthy of applause because he did not know about that case.
Some statements aren’t supposed to come from someone sitting among civilized people.
Yet no Member of the House of Reps Committee on Safety Standards and Regulations commented on this whole shenanigan.
Then in our appraisal, we had every reason to believe that there was a predetermined position and that a script was being played out.
They also went ahead to tell us to bring four persons from each group.
You know they have tagged all of us as factions, which the institute said anybody who calls us faction again, we may be in court with the person to go and prove that we are a faction.
It is either all of us are total illiterates that we do not know the definition of the word ‘faction’ or we go to court and make claims at that point as a body.
That’s why I said in that letter that it appears that the House Committee is out to factionalise ISPON.
What that portends is that there is no ISPON – all faction. So why are you asking somebody to submit the buildings and others if they are not existing? Are you following my point? The four persons I nominated, signed and submitted to the House, these ones would represent ISPON.
I did not say these ones would represent Iwuagwu faction. I said ISPON nominees. The other groups submitted their own and we were not bothered about their title.
We wanted peace but when we found that the peace was going to be peace at all cost, including peace that may not survive the next 10 minutes, we were not going to be party to that. This went on like that when the four persons from each group, making 12, all gathered and they were told not to report to their principals, where they were nominated from.
Do you know the meaning of that?
This means they are now to report to the National Assembly or a committee they called CTC.
How? At the end of every meeting the nominees should give feedback to their principals.
There is an umbilical cord linking those people and their source and they were now indoctrinated somewhere not to report to anybody.
The nominees were even trying to take minutes or notes of deliberations and were told not to write anything.
Even they explained that they needed to write to report to their people, they were told not to take anything to anybody. Is that not enough handwriting on the wall? Is that handwriting not bold enough for even the blind to see?
The CTC Chairman has said that one party pulling out of the reconciliation effort won’t stop the process and election will hold in October.
How do you react?
When a lawmaker makes a public statement of that magnitude and sensitiveness, the members of the public listening or reading will assume that that is the position of the law.
It is not good to be emotional with critical issues especially when legality is in question.
Even the United Nations conventions and resolutions of the Security Council had been rejected by signatories to such conventions and resolutions when they found out that it’s been manipulated. The great United States pulled out from the Climate Change issue.
George W. Bush was at Kyoto in 2007.
He encouraged nations to go ahead to follow it but the United States was not going to do so. He said why is China not also following it?
He said the burning of fossil fuel was producing energy needed in production process in industries and if the burning of the fossil fuel would lead to pollution of atmospheric air, then there is a relationship between prosperity and pollution because the industries must work for industrialized nations to be prosperous.
And he said why should some industrial nations still be polluting when others are told to stop.
They now made mockery of the whole thing by asking African nations that are not even industrialized to shut down industries. It was very funny, just like asking a cripple not to run fast. We must be careful when we listen to certain things. It is even causing jubilation among a lot of people who are not well informed.
He even said that they formed quorum for the CTC meeting after ISPON pulled out, that the Act says that the quorum for the Board is seven.
And that because of this they can go ahead with any meeting.
The question is: Is the CTC meeting the Board of ISPON?
Is he presiding over the Board? So he is President of ISPON and what he has is the Board?
That’s the meaning of what he is saying.
Some of us don’t want to think. Once something is said, you see jubilation.
We don’t want to task our mental capacity.
You can see that the Act says the Board has seven as quorum and the National Assembly or the CTC has assumed the Board. Is that true?
Is the CTC Chairman the President of ISPON?
ISPON is now called a faction.
Of what?
Faction of which people? A breakaway group is a faction.
To have a faction, there must be a main body.
If all of us are factions, who is the main body?
Is the National Assembly the main body of ISPON?
And if everybody is a faction, it means the National Assembly is also a faction.
Is that what he is saying? Can he go well with that kind of statement?
The fact that Boko Haram occupies 10 or 20 local governments in some states, does that make Boko Haram a legitimate group?
There are things we must be careful before we make public.
Since after that statement by the CTC Chairman of the now-disconnected group, because we have disconnected from them, I have not made any public statement because we have great respect for the National Assembly.
The Chairman of the House Committee on Safety Standards and Regulations assured my team and me that the Member of the House of Reps who is supporting and is part of the expelled (ISPON) members will not influence this thing.
But we can see that beyond even influencing, he is driving it like a car that has no steering. Immediately I mentioned that one House Member was one of the people destroying the institute, he didn’t let me finish.
He interjected and called the name of the member and told me, ‘I want to assure you.
He will not be allowed to influence this. So just have your fears allayed at this point.’ That was the voice of an honourable man and we took it without asking any other question until we started seeing these things.
Now that the position of ISPON under your leadership has been made clear, and you maintain that you want peace, what is the way forward for the institute to achieve this elusive peace?
The way forward is for people to respect the court order. If I were to be a Member of the House of Representatives Committee on Safety Standards and Regulations and I was called up to make a statement about this, the first thing would be to talk to those expelled people saying, ‘Gentlemen, you have erred.’
Till today, nobody has confronted them to say they have erred. You know why? It is because of the man behind the mask.
When you unveil the masquerade, you’ll see the man. These other guys are so unguided; they’ve been boasting in the streets calling the name of that House Member that he has assured them that nothing would happen to them.
Yet we’re being assured. If I were a Member of the House, I would tell them that since you have erred, you are to reintegrate yourselves into your parent body.
I have just used the phrase ‘parent body’ and I want you to understand what I am saying. On December 9, 2021, these expelled members had a conference and they deceived the House Committee Chairman of the Ninth Assembly to attend what they held in Lagos.
The Chairman of the House Committee on Safety Standards and Regulations in the Ninth Assembly made a speech. Because of the content of his speech, up till today the communique of that event is missing. You are a journalist. Ask them for the communique of that event.
Was there no communique? Where is it? If communique is now more prominent than a law court judgement, where is the communique of the gathering they had on December 9, 2021? The Chairman of the House Committee told them to go back to their parent body. Can a child exist without parents? Even if the child was conceived through in vitro, somebody’s spermatozoa must meet with somebody’s ovum.
The House Committee even accepted a membership list. We submitted membership list of ISPON and expelled people brought membership list.
The question is: Is it list of expelled people or ISPON members? From where? Before we were told to bring a list of members, they had compiled their list and brought, which means they had privileged information from somewhere.
If anyone feigns deafness to enable them fake ignorance of the truth of this matter, we wish them well.
We were told to bring all the accounts of an institute that has not been given one dime as budgetary allocation of government, grant or subvention.
We have not got any for once but we’re suspecting that the name of this institute is being used or was used or will be used. We believe that money has come out in the name of the institute which never got to the institute.
On one occasion, someone goofed by sending a letter to us to come and defend how we spent money.
You didn’t give us money and you say we should come and account for money? It is the most ridiculous thing.
And when we got to the place, the Ad-hoc Committee on Appropriation and Budget said: Why are you here?
When we said we were from ISPON, they asked: Who invited you? Whereas we had invitation letter.
It caused confusion.
And I said, ‘Honourable, please help us. The reason we’re here is that even if we’re not here to account for money because we’re not given money, can you help us to find out who has been taking our money?’
I was told, ‘My brother, why are you saying that type of thing? Don’t say anybody has taken your money. Just say they should put you in the next one.’
And we left. We spent money flying in and out of Abuja for this very trip. We stayed in hotel. Other bodies are collecting money.
ISPON’s, whether it is being collected mysteriously.
We are supposed to call some of the leaders of this institute and honour them, even recommend them to the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
You need to see what ISPON has been able to do with little or no support from anywhere.
This very fight you’re seeing, Mr Uzamere has not handed over the account of the institute.
He hijacked many accounts.
We have the records.
After court said his whole board is not existing, and his board members are in this new Board, he is still running a lone ranger’s business with some renegades.
He is running trainings somewhere off Mende, Maryland. We are taking inventory of all these happenings.
We are taking stock. When we say let’s ignore some of these things and bring these our colleagues back, we found out that these colleagues don’t need peace; they need power.
Are you telling me that after seven years in the wilderness of prodigal life, you want to just come back and take over the institute?
All the people that joined the institute and remained loyal, working for its progress, should they now be thrown away while you just come because you were able to co-opt a Member of the House of Reps into rebellion, tarnishing his name?
They told him what I said at the House and he came straight to me and I appreciated him that day.
He stood in front of me and said, ‘Iwuagwu, we are brothers.’ I said I always believed so until recently.
And he said we’re still brothers and we shook hands. When I was leaving the National Assembly that day, he hugged me and blessed me. I’m sure that he didn’t know that these same people have not learnt any lesson.
They are still living in the past.
They had to scuttle this golden, very rare opportunity and they have lost it.
If anyone says this will go on without ISPON good luck to the person. ISPON has announced its conference. We announced conference before we even went to the National Assembly in March.
So by withdrawal from that (reconciliation) process, we just have to go on with our original programme.
We don’t have any problem with members of the House of Reps. We only know that their good intention and our good intention has been exposed to ridicule either by commission or omission and that is the truth about it.
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