Tag: Issa-Onilu

National Orientation Agency’s Director-General, Mallam Lanre Issa-Onilu, in this interview with Bola Joseph, states that the Tinubu administration has made tangible progress and explains that why Nigerians are not psychologically connected to their nation.

For long, the National Orientation Agency was an Intensive Care Unit patient. But over the last two years, it has found vigour and relevance. In what shape was the agency you took over, and what did you do to revive it?

It will not be a correct appraisal to say it was in an intensive care unit. It actually had nobody to take it to the hospital. It was completely derelict. The personnel were disoriented, disillusioned and completely dispirited, not because they were not willing to work and not because they were not patriotic enough and not for lack of competence, but because successive governments only paid lip service despite acknowledging the importance of the agency; despite understanding that beyond the economic situation, beyond the infrastructure decay, beyond the social condition of the people, the motivation for Nigerians to even cherish and love their county was not there and they knew that it was NOA’s responsibility to do.

Despite that, they knew that you could build a mansion, and when you don’t train your children, they would sell off that mansion. So you could build a country, but if you do not develop the human capital and the mind and heart of the people are not connected to the country, no matter what you do, it will go to nothing. You could have citizens who have developed beautiful infrastructure, fantastic world-class roads and bridges, and they climb the bridges to remove the railings to sell. You can build a world-class rail system, and they go and remove the sleepers on the rail track to sell because they are not psychologically connected to the country.

So that’s the situation; the mindset of Nigerians. And that’s why there’s so much disunity, especially with the kind of children that we have raised over the last three decades like the Gen Z, who have no reason to be patriotic or to want to love their country. We had all of these on the ground. Yet, the previous government didn’t see the need to pay attention to an agency that is set up and is mandated to address that.  So that was the agency I met and the staff had gone into default; some kind of routine.  Whatever came their way, they responded to. If they didn’t come to work, they weren’t bothered.

The challenge of rebooting the agency must have been daunting. What drove you on?

Well, two things. First, this is within my competence. I left journalism and trained as a communicator. Behavioural communication is one of the strong arms of my competencies. So I understand audience behaviour. I understand audience motivation. I know about sentiment. And I know some strategies on how to move from negative to positive. And that is the first reason why I felt I’d be able to make a difference. The second reason is the government under which I’m lucky to serve. I had a relationship with the President before he became President. I know his mindset; I know his thinking. I know if you work under his system, except you don’t want to function, he will back you. As long as we are able to put the right set of ideas on the table, he will give you all the support you need. You can have all the answers, but if you don’t have the enabler like the President or the government, you cannot go far.  So, I have had these two factors working for me. Because of that, I knew I could do a few things here and make some difference.

How were you able to change the attitude of the staff to fit into your own plan for the agency?

What I needed to do was to spread my own conviction. I had a conviction that things would work and I had to go around the country. I met with the staff in the 36 states. I actually went to 812 office locations. We have offices in all the 774 local governments, we have in the 36 states and FCT and the headquarters, totaling 812 before the additional six that we just created. So I made them to understand that I also understood their situation and that we know the answers and that I could guarantee that the President would back us. So, I spread the message of hope.  Invariably, I renewed their hope, and I told them to give me a chance.

Before I got here, like many Nigerians, the refrain was “These people don’t know what they are doing”, “Why can’t they just shut down the agency?” But when I got here, I realised that it was not the agency. The Christians say owo ni keke ihinrere, which means you need resources to be able to make things happen. So I was able to transfer that conviction that I have to them and so, at least, I moved them. As I said, I have competence in behavioral communication, so I was able to move them from negative to at least neutral.  So it became much easier for me when they now saw evidence to make them to be positive.

How do you intend to keep them motivated?

I think we have passed that stage. The personnel are motivated already. What we need to do is to transfer that to Nigerians. Starting with myself, I was able to transfer that to the personnel. So, working with the personnel now is to transfer that to Nigerians so that Nigerians also can be motivated, and they can also now see reason to believe in the country. Just as we were able to make the personnel of NOA to believe in the agency. So collectively now, we are to make Nigeria to believe in Nigeria and that’s what we are doing. And we do not want to do a run-of-the-mill approach. We don’t want to take the easy way out. We have been methodical and we are social scientific about it. So that’s what we are doing. We studied what is on ground there are reasons why Nigerians are not psychologically connected to their country. And in the concept of association, you know, the sociologists will tell you that in the concept of association, an association must satisfy three basic needs. The first one is your moral need. If you are in an association where you think there is so much injustice, your interests are not protected and they are not satisfying your moral need as well as question a lot of the way they do their things, you cannot be committed to such an association.

The second need that an association must satisfy is your material need. They must be able to provide basic things that the association has promised to you as a member. So, the association in this case is Nigerian.

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So the third basic need is your psychological need. You must have reason to be satisfied, to be sentimentally connected to the country. So they must have put conditions in place for you to love the country. And you cannot love a thing that has not provided some attraction because love is emotional in the same way patriotism is emotional. There must be an attraction for you to love something.  So Nigeria must put attractive things in place to motivate Nigerians to say, “I’m proud of this country”.

No country in the world has provided everything the citizens want. But they’ve done enough to create a condition for people to have hope. And that’s why it was the most appropriate mantra or slogan for the President’s manifesto 2022-2023 election, when he said it’s a renewed hope. That’s giving people a reason to give him a chance. Two years down the line, we have moved from Renewed Hope to Hope Renewed. Because there are concrete facts on ground to show that we are on course; that the economy that we have today is our reality, not a make-believe and that we are not living a lie anymore. The Naira that you have, if you go to Forex market today, what you’ll find there is the true strength of Naira. Not padded, not aided. It’s the true strength of Naira. And a true economy should also reflect true strength of its economy. So, all we need to do is to enhance our productivity to continue to back up the Naira, for you to be able to fight and gain more strength in the market.

The opacity that you have in the oil and gas sector is taken out. We have clarity. We know what we are producing and what we are not producing. The infrastructure, we can all see that when there is an announcement of a construction, a road construction, it is not just an announcement.  You go to that site within one month, you see work going on ceaselessly all across the country. That’s the way to renew hope. You had a subsidy regime that was turning people into billionaires overnight through round-tripping and rent-seeking. Now that has been taken out.  We now have more resources for the Federal Government, for the state governments and for local governments.  The evidence is there. If you go to the states, they have been able to do more. States that could not pay salaries are now paying debts. Not only are they paying salaries, they are also paying debts.

So, whatever situation you get to, that from almost nothing you are now in a situation to even pay off your debts, there is no other name to call that other than progress. So this is how we see it. And for an agency like this that has a dual mandate, first of communicating government policies and programmes, there are enough government policies and programmes. Within less than two years, we are now in a country where just anybody who wants to go to school can go to school because there are student loans. And in the most advanced nations, that’s what they do. So you, don’t have it better than that, it’s a win-win for the students, for the parents, the guardian, the school and the government. You don’t have ASUU strike in two years. You should ask why. It is, because the government is fulfilling its promises, not only that student loans afford the school bulk money to to invest in infrastructure, research, and you know, other necessary things that they require to have a functional academic environment. So you have all of this in place.

The energy sector is now diversified, it’s mixed. We don’t rely solely on petrol to fuel our cars. The CNG alternative is there, and it is growing exponentially on daily basis. So you have all of this moving on progressively. We can see it. We can feel it in the foreign airlines that had left this country before because of a backlog of unremitted revenues. They’ve been paid off, they are back, they are doing business.

Corporations are declaring profits much more than ever. We’re having foreign direct investment beyond portfolio investors. So there are too many things that you would ask yourself how possible within just less than two years that all of this happened. So our message in NOA is clear and direct. First, to continue to tell Nigerians to be focused, not to be distracted. Not only have we found our destination, we have also found a path to that destination and we have embarked on the journey. So you don’t look back, you don’t get distracted. Anybody saying anything otherwise is trying to throw a stone on the road for us to stumble. So these are just all the things that are in place for us, and that is why we in the NOA are excited.  If you are under a government that doesn’t have things to showcase, you will take recourse to propaganda and call black white.