KINGSLEY MOGHALU- One Young Nigerian Who Believes With Him As President, Nigeria Is In Safe Hands

Early Life

Professor Kingsley Bosah Chiedu Ayodele Moghalu was born in Lagos on May 7, 1963. He is the first of five children. His father, Isaac Chukwudum Moghalu (now deceased) was a Nigerian Foreign Service Officer, one of a small group of promising young Nigerians inducted into the Ministry of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs after Nigeria's independence in 1960. 

His mother, Lady Vidah Chinelo Moghalu, was a schoolteacher at the Breadfruit School on Lagos Island who later became a professional dietician. Shortly after his birth, his father was posted to Geneva, Switzerland.

The Moghalu family spent a year in Switzerland and then moved to Washington, DC in 1964 when Isaac Moghalu was posted to the Nigerian Embassy there. In 1967, the family returned to Nigeria and Isaac Moghalu transferred to the Eastern Region Civil Service as the Nigerian political crisis gathered strength and later snowballed into a full-scale war. 

Isaac Moghalu joined the Cabinet Office of the Eastern Region, and later the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Biafra. The family remained in Eastern Nigeria after the civil war ended in 1970 and Prof. Moghalu's father later rose to become a Permanent Secretary with a strong reputation for probity. This background influenced Chiedu Moghalu's strong value system — a sense of family honor and a family tradition of public service.

Education & Early Career

After his secondary education at Eziama High School, Aba, Government College, Umuahia, and Federal Government College, Enugu, Chiedu obtained a degree in law at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and was admitted to the Nigerian Bar in 1987. 

National Youth Service under the National Youth Service Corps as a Legal Officer at Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) Ltd in Lagos followed. So did a subsequent three-year stint that combined law and journalism as General Counsel of Newswatch, the leading newsmagazine in Nigeria at the time, a prolific contributor to the opinion pages of The Guardian newspaper, and a special correspondent in Nigeria for several US and European newspapers including Africa News Service (forerunner of AllAfrica Global Media), South, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Chiedu left Nigeria again in 1991 for his post-graduate education at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, turning down an offer from a friend to remain in Nigeria and become the company secretary of a new generation bank that was being set up in Lagos. His sights were set squarely on a loftier dream, one that called for delayed gratification. That goal was a career in the United Nations. Moghalu was awarded the Joan Gillespie Fellowship at The Fletcher School. He obtained a master's degree in international relations from there in 1992.

Armed with interdisciplinary knowledge in international economics, international law and diplomacy, and a global network of contacts, Chiedu was ready to play on the world stage. He was appointed into the UN Secretariat in 1992 by then Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali on the basis of individual merit. In the UN, Moghalu worked hard and rose through the ranks from entry level Associate Officer to the highest career rank of Director. Along the way, he handled legal, strategic planning and executive management assignments at UN Headquarters in New York and in Cambodia, Croatia, Tanzania, and Switzerland.

In 2006, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Moghalu as one of five members of the high-level Redesign Panel on the UN Internal Justice System that overhauled the regulatory compliance, accountability, and dispute resolution framework that governs the global workforce of the UN. This was a core aspect of UN management reform. This six-month special assignment was at the nominal level of Under-Secretary-General, the highest political rank in the UN below the Secretary-General.

Return to Education

Chiedu had deferred his plan to study for a Ph.D. when he was appointed into the UN after his master's degree in 1992. A decade later, he returned to his quest for knowledge. By now a senior officer in the UN system in Geneva, he enrolled and studied part-time and obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in international relations at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2005. Chiedu completed his 450-page doctoral dissertation in a record-breaking 12 months and his overall degree in 18 months.

Immediately after this, he studied for and obtained the International Certificate in Risk Management at the UK Institute of Risk Management in London. Later, he received further education in macroeconomics, financial policy, and corporate governance at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Business School, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Institute

Transition to Private Sector

In the course of his UN system career, Chiedu helped design a comprehensive risk management system for the $20 billion Global Fund in Geneva, an international development finance fund established under UN auspices. There, he was also the Head of Global Partnerships and Resource Mobilization and a member of the Risk Committee.

As his passion for risk management grew, Chiedu's interests shifted to the private sector. He resigned his permanent appointment in the UN in January 2009 and established Sogato Strategies in Geneva with the minimum capital of 100,000 Swiss francs required to set up a Societe Anonyme (limited liability) corporation in Switzerland. The risk advisory firm soon won profitable mandates from global corporations such as the Swiss bank UBS and Syngenta, the Swiss agrochemicals multinational.

Central Bank of Nigeria

His expertise in risk management, and what turned out to be a fortuitous move into the private sector, eventually led to an invitation and his appointment as a Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) by the President of Nigeria, Umaru Yar'Adua in 2009. Risk management skill and knowledge was much in demand after the global financial crisis of 2008.

For five years at the Central Bank of Nigeria from November 2009 to October 2014, Chiedu Moghalu managed the systemic risks to Nigeria's financial system, made sure the system remained stable, and led the team that executed the controversial banking sector reforms initiated by then CBN Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.

It was a demanding and stressful time. The nation's financial system was negatively impacted by the global financial crisis of 2008. Nigeria's banks were hit by their lending exposures to oil and gas companies after oil prices crashed. The oil revenues, which government deposited in banks, dropped to a trickle, and the stock market, to which banks were also exposed through margin lending, nearly collapsed in 2008. As Deputy Governor in charge of Financial System Stability (FSS), he was also a member of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) and the Bank's board of directors.

Professor of Practice

Chiedu completed his five-year tenure at the CBN meritoriously in November 2014. A versatile intellectual, he was subsequently  appointed Professor of Practice in International Business and Public Policy at the prestigious Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a premier US university in Boston, Massachusetts. Premier American universities only confer the title of "professor of practice" on selected, highly accomplished individuals who combine intellectual achievements with high-level real world experience beyond the ivory tower.

Prof. Moghalu teaches the course "Emerging Africa in the World Economy" in the Economics and International Business Program of The Fletcher School, and is a Senior Fellow at the institution's Council on Emerging Market Enterprises. The Emerging Africa course is based on Moghalu's widely acclaimed development economics book Emerging Africa: How the Global Economy's 'Last Frontier' Can Prosper and Matter, published worldwide by Penguin Books in London in 2014. Prof. Moghalu is also the author of several other books including Bretton Woods: The Next 70 Years, Global Justice, and Rwanda's Genocide.

Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum

The former CBN Deputy Governor was also appointed to the global Advisory Board of the London based Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) immediately after his tenure at the CBN. OMFIF is an influential think tank and network of global institutional private investors and monetary policy experts. Prof. Moghalu is a Senior Advisor to OMFIF, one of eight members of an elite group, including:

Norman Lamont (Lord Lamont of Lerwick), Former Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom

Fabrizio Saccomanni, Former Minister of the Economy and Finance of Italy and Former Governor of the Bank of Italy

Dr. Edwin Truman, Former United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs

Dr. Mario Biejer, Former President of the Central Bank of Argentina

  

Institute for Governance & Economic Transformation

A man with a vision to influence the future, Prof. Moghalu founded the Institute for Governance and Economic Transformation (IGET) in 2016. IGET is a public policy think tank focused on contributing evidence-based solutions to help Nigeria and other African countries achieve inclusive growth and prosperity. Chiedu Moghalu was inspired to meet a need created by the absence of credible think tanks to nudge his native Nigeria towards becoming a policy-oriented society.