Mr. Shuaibu Idris has more than three decades of work experience that cuts across public sector, banking, investment and consulting. He is currently the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Time-Line Consult Limited, a financial advisory and business consulting firm. He is also a member of the national institute, having attended Senior Executive Programme at the prestigious National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, Nigeria’s premier policy institution. 

Mr. Idris, who started his career at the Kaduna State Board of Internal Revenue in 1986, has worked in different capacities and organisations including Chase Merchant Bank Nigeria, Liberty Bank, the Dangote Group Plc and Dangote Flour Mills, where he served as Deputy Managing Director, among other positions.

He holds a BSc in Accounting from Bayero University Kano and an M.A. in Banking and Finance from University of Wales, Bangor, United Kingdom.  He completed the Lagos Business School and the Harvard Business School Advanced Management Programme (AMP) and the Advanced Leadership Programme from Judge Business School, Cambridge University, U.K.

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Credit Administrators (FICA), Fellow of the Association of National Accountants of Nigeria (FCNA), Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing Nigeria (FNIMN), Fellow of Nigerian Institute of Management (FNIM) and Member, Chartered Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria (MCIPM).  He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Directors Nigeria (IoD) as well as Member of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG). He serves on the board of several private limited liability companies as well as public quoted companies as an independent director.

Dr. Leena Koni Hoffmann is an Associate Fellow of the Africa Programme at Chatham House and leads the programme’s Social Norms and Accountable Governance (SNAG) project, which is the programme’s largest and longest-running research project on governance and corruption.

For over fifteen years, she has developed and contributed to research studies on political change and democratisation, informal institutions and drivers of corruption, security sector governance and reform, regional trade and cross-border dynamics in West Africa. She has critical experience in social network mapping; household surveys and social norms measurement; gender and social exclusion (GESI) analysis. She has extensive consultative experience with international institutions including the OECD, USAID, US State Department, World Bank, UN’s World Food Programme, and the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FDCO) and the National Research Fund of Luxembourg.

She has also travelled extensively across Africa and has in-country research experience across Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Kenya, and Senegal. She is also the scientific lead for the Citizen and Security Relations in West Africa Research Programme – funded by the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor – which is studying civil society and security institutions in Chad, the Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Nigeria and Senegal.

She is a member of Transparency International’s Advisory Council and an Honorary Senior Fellow of the Global Evergreening Alliance. She hosts the OECD’s Sahel and West Africa Club’s podcast series, Women Leading Change, which spotlights transformational women who are business, thought and political leaders. From 2016 to 2020, she was a technical adviser to the Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel. She was also a Marie Curie research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and an anti-corruption investigator at Nigeria’s Independent Commission for Corrupt Practices (ICPC). Dr Hoffmann holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Sociology from the University of Jos, Nigeria, a master’s degree in International Relations from Lancaster University, UK, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in African Studies from the University of Birmingham, UK.

Mr. Simon Kolawole is the founder & CEO of Cable Media & Publishing Ltd, publishers of TheCable (www.thecable.ng), the influential Nigerian online newspaper. He is also the Executive Director of Cable Newspaper Journalism Foundation (CNJF), a not-for-profit organisation which uses the vehicle of journalism to advance transparency and accountability in government.

He was the editor of THISDAY from 2007 to 2012 and editor of Saturday THISDAY from 2002 to 2005. Kolawole earned a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos in 1992 and a master’s degree in Governance and Development from the University of Sussex, UK, as a British Chevening Scholar, in 2006. He was named among Africa’s next generation of leaders by The Banker, a publication of Financial Times of London, in 2009.

He was a Mo Ibrahim Fellow on the Governance for Development in Africa Initiative at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 2010. In March 2012, he was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. One of Nigeria’s leading columnists, Kolawole concentrates most of his thoughts and activities on nation-building and has written extensively on governance, conflict and development.