By Myke Uzendu
As the country continues to develop its international trade frontiers, the trade volume between Nigeria and Britain increased to £6.7billion, Chairman, Presidential Dinner and Awards Committee, Tajudeen Ahmed, has said.
He spoke with reporters during an event organised by the Nigerian-British Chamber of Commerce (NBCC), to formally announce the 2024 Presidential Dinner and Awards ceremony in Lagos.
The forum provided key insights into the year’s Presidential Dinner and Awards, an event designed to celebrate excellence and foster collaboration between Nigerian and British businesses
Explaining the protocol of a new leader, he said that when a new president is installed, the sitting president organizes or superintends what is called the Presidential Year of Awards. “Again, what this meant is, in 2025, the same period of November to December, at the latest, first week of December, obviously because of Christmas, the chamber would have what is called the Presidential Inauguration Week for a new president.
“So the chamber would have a two-year period for presidents. And so, the current president of the chamber, Ray Atelle, would superintend this program, this would be his last program as a sitting president.
“The next one we’ll have next year is the Presidential Inauguration Week. For some other organisations, there are tenors that are always one year. While the chamber has tenors, tenors are two years for the president for an executive committee.
“So what do we do at the presidential dinner, when people hear dinner, they think it’s about food. For us at the chamber, it’s not about food,” he said.
According to Ahmed, the dinner is used as an opportunity to speak to stakeholders, Nigerian and British businesses, the members of the chamber, and actually non-members, to showcase what the chamber has done the year gone by, and what the chamber actually has for different stakeholders.
He said: “We’ve had instances where, because of the way we acted at our events, especially the Presidential Inauguration Dinner or the Presidential Dinner Awards, we’ve actually got new members joining the chamber, so it’s not a member-only event. It’s an event that’s open to the general public, and certain stakeholders, a share of the business community” adding in Nigeria today, the chamber have opened for 47 years and still counting.
Ahmed said amongst all the bilateral chambers of commerce in the country, NBCC was the only bilateral chamber of commerce that operates from its own structure, ‘so this building belongs to us, we didn’t just put a placard up there to say it’s NBCC’, he stated.
“It is actually our freehold property; every other single bilateral chamber of commerce operates from rented apartments, where somebody is a member of council. So we are the foremost bilateral chamber of commerce in this country”, he said.
Ahmed said the chamber had done a bit in terms of trying to foster a business relationship between Nigeria and Britain. For instance, it has a trade mission to the United Kingdom earlier in the year, where members led by President Tinubu visited Birmingham and London, which is something we do every year, an opportunity for our businesses here to actually have a feel of the British environment.
He said the chamber was not just Nigerian business chamber of commerce by word of mouth or by verbalism, but actually by communicating and commuting with members of the British establishment, as it were.
On the dinner and awards, Ahmed said as the name implies, ‘you have a dinner where you dine on wine, you listen to new music, the spoken word, you have some cultural entertainer guest, we actually have awards as well’.
He said the awards were focused on both members and non-members. According to him, members of the chamber that have done so well in the past year, under the first year of the sitting president, are given those awards. And in trying to do that, we actually have a subcommittee.
One of the five subcommittees that are engaged with this event is the awards subcommittee, the awards and plaque subcommittee. Their mandate he said was to determine the criteria for these awards, working in conjunction with the President adding we don’t give any origin for these awards.
“So the criteria, they’re known to members of the subcommittee. The winners are not known to everybody until the event. We also award, in external presence, people we have adjudged to have done so well in their individual and their corporate capacities.
They could be members, they could be non-members, but it’s open to the general public. And, one of the things we’ve done in the past to get these awards is to award people that have done excellently well in their chosen career. So we had instances where people that have done so well and, there are different eras of anybody being awarded at that event”, he stated.