Why the silence on NAICOM?
The National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) usually a self-effacing institution, and necessarily so, given the nature of its business, has been in the news lately for a lot of reasons which are bound to shake the confidence of the public in the Commission whose basic product is trust. It is a cardinal principle of insurance, which also constitutes the bedrock of modern enterprise, that trust is fundamental not only with regard to the activities of the individual companies within the sector but especially in the Commission established to regulate the sector.
In Nigeria, NAICM is the regulatory body and it is one of the parastatals under the Ministry of Finance.
For years NAICOM has maintained a dignified presence. Its Commissioner, who until the incumbent served two terms, was hardly in the news preferring to operate from the background as much as possible. All that has changed in the last few years. The current NAICOM Commissioner was appointed to an unprecedented third term by the Abacha administration a few months before the death of the former dictator and for a period of two years served without a board of directors, making him a sole administrator. Only history would tell if those years of wielding absolute power over an entire sector has been beneficial to the national economic interest. But it is an axiom that absolute power tends to affect those in possession of it in ways not socially advantageous.
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