Musa Babatunde Sanni was born on August 30, 1955 at Ijebu- Imusin, Ogun State, into the family of Balogun Jimoh Adekoya Sanni. His father, Balogun Sanni, a renowned educationist and respected community leader, was one of the founding fathers of Muslim Primary School, Ijebu- Imusin.
He attended Muslim Primary School, Ijebu-Imusin, and Ansar-ud-Deen Primary School, Alakoro, Lagos, between 1960 and 1966 for his primary school education; before he proceeded to Muslim College, Ijebu-Ode, for his secondary school education, and later to Adeola Odutola College for his HSC. He thereafter attended the prestigious University of Ibadan, where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry in 1977.
He worked briefly with Food and Drug Administration of the Federal Ministry of Health (FMH), which is now NAFDAC, as a Scientific Officer, analysing food and drugs, before he decided to change his profession and therefore moved to a firm of chartered accountants (Arthur Young Osindero & Co.) where he was trained while writing professional ICAN examinations. He became a Chartered Accountant in 1984 and is now a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria.
Thereafter, Mr. Tunde Sanni worked briefly with a management consultancy firm before settling down to a long term career in NNPC as an Internal Auditor, where he has worked for over 26 years, rising through the ranks to the position of General Manager. As an external auditor and consultant, he has rendered different professional services, including accountancy services, auditing, taxation and financial advisory services to small, medium and big companies and also provided restructuring and turn-around consulting services to some small scale companies.
He is an active change agent who participated in the historical restructuring of NNPC into a commercialised group of companies with 11 subsidiaries between 1987 and 1989 under the Commercialisation, Reorganisation and Capitalisation Task Force (CRC), driven by Arthur Anderson consulting unit. Based on the assessment of his ability as a change agent, he was selected as the Consultant Counterpart Staff to coordinate the World Bank financed training of the NNPC Internal Auditors and was thereafter charged with the responsibility of setting up an in-house training unit for the training of NNPC internal auditors. He performed creditably on this role and became an accomplished trainer and in-house facilitator to the NNPC Group Learning Department.
As an internal Auditor in NNPC, his audit experience traverse all sectors of the oil and gas industry, as he has been directly involved in the conduct, supervision and management of the audit of virtually all the companies and business units under the NNPC group.
He had also been directly involved in the conduct, supervision and management of joint venture audits of most of the major oil companies in joint venture with NNPC and served in various committees to resolve audit issues, particularly the Value for Money (VFM) audits conducted by SS Afemikhe & Co and other firms, which became of interest to the House of Representative Committee on Petroleum. He played a key role by providing professional support to the then GED F&A and GMD of NNPC in explaining technical details necessary for the resolution of the thorny issues arising from the VFM Audit report to the Hon. Minister of Petroleum and the House of Representative Committee on Petroleum.
He is a practising Muslim who has been supporting Islamic activities both in Lagos where he resides and Ijebu Imusin, his home town, while also extending goodwill gestures towards the Christian organisations. In March 2014, he was turbaned as the Asiwaju Adinni of the Muslim Community of Ijebu Imusin.
Babatunde Sanni is a committed philanthropist and a protagonist of unconditional love as a social necessity between all those who profess to serve God, without prejudice to religion, tribe or gender. In line with this, he has personally given various degrees of scholarships to undergraduates from various part of the country with different religious backgrounds and gender. Some of the beneficiaries of his scholarship scheme are indigenes of Ijebu-Imusin. To sustain this laudable programme, he co-founded an NGO called NATION OF LOVE FOUNDATION, a charitable organisation that grants scholarships to the under-privileged and empowers the unemployed through financial assistance to set up small scale businesses. He is happily married with two sons.
