Faced with present day realities, many youths are taking their destinies in their hands. They are no longer looking for jobs; they are establishing their own companies, which have potential of blossoming into big enterprises. Assistant Editor CHIKODI OKEREOCHA reports on the inspiring exploits of budding youth entrepreneurs who, against all the odds, are exploiting opportunities in the SME sector.
Despite her mien, it is easy to see the determination of Omolere Oiku to conquer the business world. At 26, the 2010 Accountancy graduate from the Covenant University in Ota, Ogun State, is already an employer. Three people are in her employ, even as she plans to take more youths off the unemployment market.
Lery B Designs, which came about through her resourcefulness, specialises in high quality hair extensions, hand-made jewellery, beads and hair accessories. “I want to meet the beauty needs of women in Nigeria and Africa,” she said, exuding a business tycoon’s confidence.
It was a target she set for herself in 2013 when she set up the business. And two years down the line, Oiku is inching closer to realising the target.
The uniqueness of her jewellery, made from crystals, corals, German stones and pearls, in line with customer specifications, has made her firm the toast of fashion-conscious women in Nigeria and beyond.
When The Nation met with the budding entrepreneur at the recently concluded ‘TeamFest Africa 2015,’ she said customer satisfaction has been her unique selling point and one of the secrets of her success so far.
Oiku said she has her eyes on building a flourishing small business empire in the burgeoning fashion industry.
TeamFest Africa was a three-day African business exhibition fair, which provided a platform for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to sell and connect with customers.
Organised in Lagos by Olsen Decker Nigeria Ltd., the marketing/TV rights owner of TeamFest Africa, the fair provided an opportunity for SMEs and budding entrepreneurs to network and build capacity. It also encouraged existing and aspiring entrepreneurs who cannot afford the cost of exhibition stands to exhibit their products and services free of charge.
Interestingly, Oiku is not the only budding youth entrepreneur that jumped on the TeamFest Africa platform to take advantage of the bountiful but largely untapped opportunities in the SME sector.
Dennis Omadide, another promising youth entrepreneur, has also taken the arts and crafts industry by storm. In and around Maryland, Lagos, the hub of cane craft business, he is one of the most sought-after cane weavers. His artistic and creative designs have earned him the confidence of customers who daily throng his workshop.
“I have been in this business for more than 20 years,” he told The Nation, pointing out that “Everybody cannot work in banks or oil companies.”
That was instructive. While most of Omadide’s peers are probably still roaming the streets in search of non-existent jobs in banks and oil companies, the Delta State-born cane weaver counts himself lucky to have shunned paid employment.
“Patronage has been good,” he confessed, saying, “We sell some cane chairs under N120,000; some N80,000, depending on what the customer wants. Some people buy sets or singles, depending on the apartment they have.”
Omadide, who is the Vice Chairman of National Cane Weavers Association, however, said patronage could have been better but for the rising violent campaign by Boko Haram insurgents. According to him, the activities of the Islamic extremists have became a pain in the neck of cane weavers, as products need to be carried to the North where most markets have been shut down. “We only transact the business between the South and the West here. We are selling but not like before,” he lamented.
He said he and other weavers source raw materials from suppliers most of whom are members of National Cane Suppliers of Nigeria. The suppliers, he said, are in Delta, Bayelsa, and some parts of Edo State. Cane, which is the major raw material, is a non-timber product found abundantly in the bush, especially in the Niger Delta. It can be used to weave any kind of furniture, handicraft and other household articles, from baskets to rocking chairs, baby cots, settees, bridegroom chairs and even mirror.
Some of the designs made by Omadide easily beat those made by wood, iron and plastic ware manufacturers in aesthetics and durability. Same for paintings made by Lekan Kushimo, another budding entrepreneur, who is into painting and photography. Since 2013 when he made his break, landing a juicy contract to do six large paintings and 60 small water colours for a hotel, the 2002 graduate of Civil Engineering has never looked back.
Lekan cut his teeth in photography and paintings while in school.
“I am a photographer and an artist. While I was doing my course, I used to go to a studio behind the engineering department with my friends to draw and paint,” he said, adding that he also visits the Internet to further hone his skills, aside attending a media school for photography.
Some of the results of Lekan’s personal development could be gleaned from his artistic portrait of the Civic Centre that also encapsulates some of the buildings of 1004, the Nigeria Law School perimeter fencing on Ozumba Mdadiwe Road, and Falomo Ikoyi Bridge, among others.
Although, he declined to say how much he makes from the business, he admitted that patronage has been encouraging, but could be better.
The long road to the centre stage
For budding entrepreneurs, running a successful SME particularly in Nigeria is no tea party. Their gradual but steady road to fame and fortune has been long and tortuous. For instance, many of them lack finance, which has been identified as one of the major challenges of establishing and running an SME. Because of this, they could not procure the necessary operational equipment and facilities. They literarily squeeze water from stone, with most of them constrained to rely on personal and family funds to carry out their businesses.
A survey conducted by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) showed that there are 17.28 million MSMEs in Nigeria employing 32.41 million people and accounting for an estimated half of Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
However, access to affordable finance remains one of the major challenges inhibiting the MSMEs’ growth and development. According to the CBN, only 4.2 million MSMEs have access to finance. Because of banks and other lending institutions’ aversion to lending to small businesses in the informal sector, about N9.6t is said to be needed to bridge the financing gap in the MSMEs sector.
That is not the only disincentive. A lot of them are weighed down by the country’s harsh operating environment. For instance, despite their small size, SME operators not only contend with excessive taxation, but also pay multiple taxes to the different tiers of government. They also struggle with government’s policy inconsistencies, which affect their projections.
The huge infrastructure gap in the country has not helped matters either. Apart from dilapidated roads, which push up the cost of moving products by SMEs to areas where they are in high demand, the cost of acquiring and maintaining generators to power their businesses in the face of poor or even non availability of electricity has been a burden too heavy to bear.
Other challenges that stand in the way of the growth and development of start-ups include bad management, which has to do with poor leadership, inadequate training, lack of succession plan, poor record keeping, no strategic or business plan, and lack of entrepreneurial skills, among others.
The General Manager, Enterprise Development Centre (EDC), Pan Atlantic University, Mr. Olawale Anifowoshe, could not agree less on the big challenge posed by quality of leadership. He said some owners of start-ups are not properly trained and mentored into management roles.
This, he said, explains why finding the right skill is a big problem for most SMEs, as they could not recruit the best people for the right roles.
Anifowoshe, who spoke at the recent ‘SME Empowerment Innovation Challenge East and West Africa’ organised by HIIL Innovating Justice and Ford Foundation in Lagos, however, said the Centre supports entrepreneurs and enterprises to strengthen their skills and abilities. It also helps them grow businesses that generate income, sustainable economic growth and impact.
However, centres in the mould of EDC are private sector led interventions intended to help bridge the gap created by successive governments’ failure to harness, engage and unleash the innate productive potentials of youths for national development. This is despite the fact that Nigeria boasts a predominantly youth population of over 70 million most of who are unemployed.
Director General/CEO, Nigerian Youth Chamber of Commerce (NYCC), Comrade Peter Ayim, noted that the concept of entrepreneurship, though an emerging phenomenon, is fast gaining momentum and acknowledged as the critical pathway to growing the economy, generating jobs and creating wealth thereby combating and reducing unemployment, hunger and poverty.
Comrade Ayim, however, expressed regrets that although policy makers seem to appreciate the prospects, potentials and positive impact of entrepreneurship, it is evident that they have not been able to develop a result oriented and sustainable policy framework and intervention mechanism targeted at supporting the accelerated promotion and development of functional youth entrepreneurship in Nigeria.
He told The Nation that though government has demonstrated commitment to promoting youth entrepreneurship through short term intervention programmes, most of the intervention programmes are limited in scope and does not benefit a broad spectrum of aspiring youth entrepreneurs to facilitate start-ups or assist existing youth entrepreneurs in expanding their businesses.
Citing the YouWIN programme, an acronym for ‘Youth Enterprise with Innovation in Nigeria’, the NYCC DG said, for instance, that “Such short term measures are usually handouts and tokenism that cannot in any sense facilitate and grow a functional start-up or micro-enterprise.”
‘YouWiN’ is an innovative business plan competition launched by the Federal Government with the aim of creating jobs by encouraging and supporting aspiring entrepreneurial youths to develop and execute business ideas. The initiative hopes to trigger a ripple effect that would inspire the creative and entrepreneurial spirit of millions of youths across the country.
The scheme is also expected to help identify and empower young Nigerian entrepreneurs with the technical skills and capital needed to start or grow a business such that they could create employment for themselves as well as for others in different areas. But Comrade Ayim argued that the scheme is limited in scope.
He also decried the orientation of state and non-state actors who he said are in a hurry to jumpstart employment policies of state that are only targeted at giving grants and soft loans to youth to keep them off the street and engage them with an activity they don’t understand its guiding philosophy and modus operandi. He insisted that such attitude must be discouraged.
Hear him: “Entrepreneurship as it is currently being practiced should not become government’s bait to lure the youth only to maintain law and order. For them, the higher the number, the higher the score card.
Entrepreneurship policies are not intended to build wealth in Nigeria but used as a criteria to boost government performance evaluation.
This could be seen in the number of failed schemes in Nigeria youth empowerment drive.
Ayim identified another obvious gap in the system as the lack of synergy between the public and the private sector working together to achieve a common objective of promoting the development of youth entrepreneurship. “The only seeming existing synergy recently fostered is the public/public synergy between the Industrial Training Fund (ITF), Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) and the BOI,” he pointed out.
Youths see opportunities in challenges
For the new kids on the entrepreneurship block, it is survival or nothing. What their peers see as challenges, they see as opportunities. Many of them see the opportunities in the SME sector too tempting and rewarding to ignore and so refused to be bogged down by the several hurdles on the way to greatness. They heed the wise counsel of starting small and growing big.
Ocheni Onuche Simon is one of them. With a paltry N1, 250 seed capital, the Computer Science graduate from the University of Abuja, is today the proud owner of a flourishing manufacturing outfit that produces the ‘Kasso Flakes-Soaking Wakkis.’ “My business kicked off on June 7, 2013, with an initial capital of only N1, 250.00 during my service year at the Nigerian Army, Abuja, where I served. At the Headquarters of the Nigerian Army, I had a lot of customers and that made the business to spread to other arms of the Armed Forces,” he said.
More than anything else, it was the innovativeness, ingenuity and creativity that the budding entrepreneur brought to bear on the business that should challenge other unemployed youths. Apart from the fact that Ocheni’s products are indigenous and are found virtually in every home. While every Nigerian knows it as garri, Ocheni and his company gave it the name “Kasso Flakes-Soaking Wakkis,” which simply means cassava only flakes.
He explained it thus: The name ‘soaking wakkis’ simply means “soak and eat” with varieties such as meat (i.e Kilishi), milk, sugar and groundnut. Others are garri with groundnut only, garri with groundnut and sugar, garri with Kulikuli, better known as ground nut cake. This is also in addition to our premium product “Sollo ‘G’, derived from swallow garri. This category is best for dough i.e Eba.”
The same ingenuity and creativity also saw Amaechi Goodluck, a 28-year old 400-Level English/Christian Religious Knowledge student of Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education, Lagos, establishinmg a strong foothold in the education sector where she is one of the most sought after private tutors. No fewer than nine pupils aged three to fourteen from different parents are currently receiving tutorials from her for a fee.
Goodluck, from Abia State, told The Nation that her ultimate ambition is to set up a thriving private school. She said opportunities abound in the education sector for unemployed youths wishing to take up part-time or full time jobs as private tutors. She stated that from crèche to nursery, primary to secondary and even tertiary level, private tutors are in high demand to fill the gap left by inadequate and sometimes unqualified teachers in various levels of the education sector.
She said although, she currently concentrates on nursery/primary pupils, secondary school students as well as those in adult education classes, she hopes to incorporate university undergraduates when she completes her degree programme. She said beyond certificate, passion, commitment, diligence and patience are qualities required for anyone to excel in any small business of his or her choice. BoI’s interventions.
The Bank of Industry (BoI), Nigeria’s foremost development finance institution, says it is not unaware of the challenges facing operators in the SME sector. Its Managing Director, Mr. Rasheed Olaoluwa, said BoI recognises the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) sector as the engine of economic growth because of its potential to create jobs, boost production, and reduce poverty hence it has come out with intervention programmes to reposition the sector. Some of the interventions that stand out include the signing of a service agreement with 122 Business Development Service Providers (BDSPs) to address the challenges of poor packaging of loan requests and non-bankable business plans, which are believed to be responsible for the low level of financial support to the sector; partnering Grow Africa Equity Partners Limited to raise a $60m Venture Capital Fund (VCF) for SMEs.
There is also the continuation of sector-specific intervention funds by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Ministry of Agriculture, Solid Minerals and others; managed funds from various state governments and foundations; long-term loans at very low interest rates from multi-lateral/international development institutions.
Despite these interventions, Comrade Ayim insists that “there is the urgent imperative for a functional public/private partnership that will facilitate a robust, dynamic and sustainable enterprise development eco-system in line with contemporary trend and global best practices in the promotion and development of youth entrepreneurship.
