LEADERSHIP Award Great Honour For Me – ITF Boss

The director-general/chief executive of Industrial Training Fund (ITF), Joseph Ari, has described the LEADERSHIP Award bestowed on him as a great honour, promising to attend the annual event scheduled for January 31, 2023 at the International Conference Centre, Abuja.

Ari stated this yesterday in Abuja while addressing a top management team from LEADERSHIP Group Limited who paid him a courtesy visit at his office, where he was presented with the letter for the LEADERSHIP of Public-Service Person of the Year 2022.

He was selected for the prestigious award for his home-grown initiatives that helped expand existing skills acquisition programmes leading to the training and empowerment in four years, of over 500,000 Nigerians who are now earning sustainable livelihood as paid employers and entrepreneurs.

The LEADERSHIP management team was led by the vice chairman, Mike Okpere; executive director, Abraham Nda-Isaiah; director of adverts, Farida Ismail, among others. 

Okpere explained that the LEADERSHIP 2022 Award, which is the 14th in the series, is to recognise persons who attained positions of responsibility and doing remarkable things in public service.

“These awards are given to deserving persons who have attained positions of height and achieved excellence in their outputs. For the 2022 Award, we found it necessary and decided that three persons deserved to be given LEADERSHIP Public Service Persons of the Year 2022. We are proud to say that Sir Joseph Ari, the DG-ITF is one of those persons,” he said.

Responding, Ari commended management of LEADERSHIP for finding him worthy among those to be recognised as public persons for the year 2022.

“For me, this is a very great honour done to us because the giver of this award has paid his dues in terms of the reportage of development and in terms of developmental journalism that it has carried through since its establishment.

“LEADERSHIP Newspaper is a household name. It has credibility and its readership is quite wide and large among Nigerians and has a lot of reputation, backed up by some great journalism processes.

“For me, I would like to dedicate this award to the Nigerian people for it is on their behalf that I’m holding in trust the responsibilities of running the affairs of ITF, a parastatal under the aegis of Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment, charged with the responsibility to equip as many Nigerians as possible with the requisite skills for employability and entrepreneurship.

“Secondly, I would also want to dedicate this award to President Muhammadu Buhari for finding me worthy for this appointment out of over 200 million Nigerians, some of whom are even better placed than I. 

“Finally, I would like to dedicate the award to the management and staff of Industrial Training Fund for their support to the vision that we have enunciated over the years,” he stated.