At the UNCTAD/ISAR meeting, Pan African Federation of Accoutants vice-president Koos du Toit gave an update on the organisation’s inroads in the build-up to the next African Congress of Accountant in Uganda in May 2017. Interview by Vincent Huck
The Accountant: You were appointed vice-president of the Pan African Federation of Accountants (PAFA) in May 2015 for a two-year term, so, in your year-and-a-half as vice-president, what has happened and what have been the key highlights for PAFA?
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Koos du Toit: What has been very exciting is that we’ve done a complete review of the strategic plan. The last strategic plan was prepared in 2012 when PAFA was just established. We’ve identified specific strategic goals; we’ve identified the role of PAFA; and we’ve identified the resources that we need. Looking forward into the next four or five years, PAFA has identified that one of its most important objectives is to strengthen our PAOs in francophone Africa.
We’ve got a large number of members from francophone Africa, but we want to work actively with them, and with FIDEF in developing the capacity of those PAOs. Essentially, in terms of the membership of the PAOs, it’s largely limited to members in public practice, and those that are no longer in public practice are not entitled to membership. Consequently, the questions are, who’s organising? Who’s mobilising? Who is supporting those accountants who are no longer members of the PAO?
Looking at international standards, it’s one thing to achieve adoption, but the hard part is implementation. And if you don’t have an organised body of professional accountants – and I stress here not professional auditors – to work with the implementation, there are going to be significant challenges in that second phase. A simple question to ask is: how one can audit financial statements if there isn’t anybody preparing them in terms of the international financial reporting standards? From a PAFA perspective, we are committing resources, working with FIDEF to support the French PAOs into looking at the francophone PAO business model, and really looking at how to structure the profession.
It’s going to be a long road, but small steps are being taken all the way every day in our progress and collaboration.
The Accountant: What can you tell me in terms of membership development?
Du Toit: We started off as 37 members from 34 countries. We’re now up to 43 members from 39 countries, and we’ve got four associates – those are members that have joined but don’t meet all the membership criteria. The secretariat is working with those bodies to get them to the level of maturity where we hope to see them join as full members. We’re very excited about Lusophone Africa. Cape Verde Islands became a full member in 2016. OCAM from Mozambique became a full member. And we admitted the Angolan PAO in August. So we have three very good-quality members.
The choir of voices in PAFA is becoming more melodious as we’ve now got French, English, Portuguese and Arabic members. We’re very excited to have strong contact and liaison with a new body in Tunisia, with the Egyptian society, and with two bodies from Algeria that are in the process of finalising their applications. So, our choir will soon have new members to strengthen our common voice. PAFA looks forward to being able to represent Africa at international fora; to represent the accounting profession; and to be able to show the world what capacity we have, what challenges we have, and how we can work together to overcome them.
The Accountant: You established this renewed strategic plan for PAFA.
Du Toit: Obviously one of our strategic objectives is to strengthen PAOs in general, but we have got a specific objective to work with our francophone PAOs. However because it’s not a one-size-fits-all scenario we have to look at the different conditions for different PAOs. Because francophone Africa is such an important and large part of Africa, we know we’ve got to have stronger participation, and that comes back to strengthening the PAOs.
Strengthening the capacity of the Federation is also important because you can’t walk the talk if you don’t have the capacity. For this I must give credit to IFAC and the MOSAIC initiative, because through that and the collaboration with the PAFA secretariat, we have commitments from the DFID to fund a technical director and from CIPFA funding for a public finance management manager, which is fantastic because something that’s so vital in the role of PAOs in Africa is to support governments achieving the sustainable development goals.
It’s also wonderful to share that we’ve got strong commitment from the African Development Bank. So the support for PAFA is not just foreign, it’s internal too. It’s Africans supporting Africans. And the AFDB funding is committed to strengthening seven PAOs in terms of developing strategic plans with them, and that covers the whole spectrum of language groups.
The Accountant: And what’s the objectives for the next six months until the next African Congress of Accountants (ACOA)?
Du Toit: ACOA in itself is an objective. It’s a platform to showcase the profession in Africa. So we’ll be focused on making sure it’s going to be a vibrant and exciting event.
