Business Reporter
CORPORATE governance is the key driver of business performance and a major factor when it comes to attracting investors, according to the newly elected president of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators in Zimbabwe, Mr Pious Manamike.
Mr Manamike, AICO Africa group company secretary and previously one of the institute's two vice-presidents, was elected president at the ICSAZ annual general meeting on June 7, replacing Mrs Avilla Goba, whose term of office had come to an end.
Carnauldmetalbox Zimbabwe finance director and company secretary, Glovah Madzima, was re elected as vice-president. Prospective Enterprises managing director, Denford Mberi, who is a past chief executive of Red Star Holdings, was elected the other vice-president.
So important does Mr Manamike consider corporate governance to be that he has adopted 'Corporate Governance: the Key Driver to Business Performance' as his theme for the institute over the next year.
"In my interactions with stockbrokers, analysts and potential investors it has become apparent that, apart from looking at a business's numbers, they attach a great deal of value to corporate governance structures," he said.
"Research has shown," he said, "that those companies that have good corporate governance structures always perform better than those that have weak governance structures. Every organisation should have structures that ensure investors' money is safe and grows," he said, adding that business failures were largely due to poor corporate governance structures.
There was need, he said, for proper checks and balances at board level. If one board member dominated discussions and other board members felt unable to challenge him, then there would be problems.
Every idea should be tested before being adopted. A company was viewed as having weak governance structures if there was not a wide enough base of independent non-executive directors.
Mr Manamike urged chartered secretaries who were finance directors, company secretaries or board members to take a leading role in influencing what happened at board level. They should take a firm stance, he said, where there were issues that needed to be rectified. He said the country was still feeling the effects of the hyperinflationary period it went through when many aspects of good corporate governance were abandoned, with black market foreign currency activities, for instance, being condoned as unavoidable if an organisation was to survive.
"Some of those who graduated in 2002 have never worked in a normal environment. They have never seen what we would say are proper corporate governance procedures taking place, because they have been used to seeing what happened during the past decade," he said. 
For this reason, he said, there was need for some