The Nigerian Postal Services (NIPOST) appears to have gone into irrelevance, with the rise and acceptability of the internet. But the new Post Master-General and CEO, NIPOST, Asiwaju Bisi Adegbuyi, says the percentage email has taken from the post is insignificant. He says NIPOST will leverage on its wider reach to promote digital economy, create jobs and grow contributions to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). LUCAS AJANAKU met him in Lagos.
You are coming from the private sector and you have spent about three or four months as NIPOST’s CEO, what are your impressions?
It’s a story of the good, the bad and the ugly. NIPOST is a microcosm of Nigeria; you would see signs that would get you excited and say yes we are going to make progress, you would also see signs of dilapidated infrastructure, low staff morale, people that have not been trained but are ready to be trained or otherwise, they will be left behind because what is going to happen to NIPOST is what we call breeze-way. And it is blowing. You better join the train and be part of the new system. We are going to train our people and re-train them. The first thing I did when I came onboard was to begin visitation to territories and see things for myself. I have been to places and I haven’t completed the tour yet. But what I have seen is a mixed bag. We have properties scattered all over Nigeria that we can use, but don’t blame the people that have been there before from the system. When you are within a system, you only look at how to strike a balance and make ends meet. Somebody from the private sector would look beyond that; he would do strategic thinking, do public private partnership (PPP) and bring in people from the private sector. They are already coming in torrents because I am one of them. And again, you need to do legislative reforms, amend your laws by virtue of the fact that I am one of them and they know where I am coming from and they are ready to support me. These are the things that have been difficult in the past that would not be difficult for us to do. I can make this public, the World Bank in conjunction with Nigeria, had contracted the services of a Dutch consultant in the last five to eight years. And the reports have not been implemented. These are the things that I would do by virtue of my training as a lawyer to reposition NIPOST into a business making organisation.
The emergence of email is said to have killed the relevance of NIPOST, do you agree with this?
No, I do not agrre with that. The emergence of email will not kill the post offices. Emails have taken 20 per cent away from us and they have given us 50 per cent. Mails will decline but packages and parcels are growing exponentially; the e-commerce ecosystem is such that we need to deploy technology, back-end payment solutions and all of that, merchant aggregations, these are people that we are bringing on-board, proposals have been sent and we are under studying them.
There is a push for made-in-Nigeria products. How well has NIPOST done in this area in terms of quality?
Again that is why we are saying technology is a tool to reposition Nigeria; and even the workshop. if you think that we are going to be romantically and patriotically talking about made-in-Nigeria goods, we will be deceiving ourselves, because an average consumer is faced with choices and if what you are offering is inferior or uncompetitive, he/she is going to search for where to find value for his/her money. Don’t let us be esoteric about this made-in-Nigeria goods advocacy. We have to look at the fundamentals. What are the fundamentals? How cost effective are you? What kind of technology are you doing? If for instance you are supposed to patronise NIPOST for logistics and delivery so that your cost can come down, were you going to do it yourself? People doing that with NIPOST would be far and ahead of you and therefore you are out of the business. And that is why it is important that what we have, we must leverage on it- the reach and the network. We are not going to rely only on mails. Logistics, warehousing, real estate, these are my areas of competences. This will include financial services and financial inclusion, it’s a whole lot of value chain. But as I have said, this is the first time we are going to get the Nigerian people to get used to what we are doing in NIPOST. So that huge market, the energetic, brilliant entrepreneurially driven Nigerian youth would be found useful for NIPOST and the money they are making would be part of the money we also going to make from them. Look at the process service industry in the world today. Look at its success in Kenya and what’s the population of Kenya? It simply means that if we get 60million Nigerian youths to patronise NIPOST, you offer them value, you give them what they really need to advance their businesses and services, we would make more money than people can ever imagine. This requires strategic thinking. It requires somebody from the private sector who has passion, who has clarity of thought on how to go about all these things. We are also going to look at the legislative framework. Let us not deceive ourselves, if we want to compete with our major competitors out there, if we want to be of the global best practices, then we must do away with the bureaucracy that we are confronted with. However, as I have said in other places, it is going to be the interaction, what is called the dialectical process of the forces of prices that are meeting to produce synthesis to the state of equilibrium.
How are you going to convince government and the MDAs to patronise NIPOST?
Government is already convinced by bringing for the very first time a Postmaster General from the private sector. It has seen the need for NIPOST to be run as a business enterprise. So you don’t need to convince government because it has been convinced. A government that is faced with dwindling oil revenue, a government that wants to tackle all avenues of making money would have to look at NIPOST which is like a goldmine. However, there are obstacles we must clear off the way. Depending on where you are coming from, some people will see challenges and some will see obstacles and while others will see the unbelievable opportunities that are behind the formidable obstacles and challenges. And that is the kind of person I am. I am strategic about it. We have collaborations with all critical stakeholders- the executive and the legislature. It’s going to be a kind of symbiotic relationship. Legislators are elected to serve the people. If NIPOST is taking this position, we can generate huge employment. When you generate huge employment, you generate huge money, the entrepreneurs are enhanced, they are given the opportunity to reduce their cost, the economy would move and the value chain is very long. Economic recession as we should all know is not a crime. Countries have experienced it in the past but what were the strategies put in place to get out of recession? These are some of the indices we are discussing to get Nigeria out of this recession using a critical national institution. Post office created America. America does not joke with their post office. The same thing when we were growing up, the first set of account we opened was with P and T in OYO.
How many jobs can a well-positioned NIPOST create?
I am not an economist. The truth of the matter is that there is the NIPOST of the past and the new NIPOST. We are laying a solid foundation. As you know NIPOST is a microcosm of Nigeria. The story of NIPOST is the story of Nigeria. When President Muhammadu Buhari came two years ago, (the whole system had virtually collapsed) though people have been complaining now, it is very easy to do the super structure, but the real foundation is always difficult. I have been a real estate lawyer for so many years and I know that when you are doing the foundation, nobody would see what you are doing but when you are done with the foundation and you begin to put the building blocks, you will begin to see the edifice emerge. That is the level we are now. But we are going to work with the Nigerian youths about 70 millions of them; we are going to help our people in the rural areas, farmers, artisans; teach them new methods of planting; new methods of doing things. Where can they export their goods to? They don’t know but we do because we belong to the Universal Postal Union (USPS) which has 192 member-countries. That is an international gate way for people to know where you are; for people to know where the people that will need your goods are. If you do that, the multiplier effect of that on employment will be monumental not to talk of impact on financial inclusion and financial services. We are talking about selling our stamps. I do not talk about stamp duties. We are talking about selling our stamps, affixing it, address it, you denote it manually and then we also have the capacity to deploy e-stamps. You would never imagine the number of young men and women that would become agents selling our stamps when we begin the enforcement of Section 89 of the Stamp Duties Act. We are working underground. Wait for a new NIPOST, a NIPOST that will be alive to its responsibility, a NIPOST that will be market-friendly, a NIPOST that will be customer-friendly, a NIPOST that will not rely on just brick and mortal mail movement and all of that, but a NIPOST that will go into other areas.
What informed the NIPOST workshop?
THE starting point is to look at how does a nation progress. Countries that have prospered have relied heavily on small and medium scale businesses as they are supposed to be protected by technology. The essence of this workshop/seminar/ customer forum is to drive home the point that the world is moving to a transformation by deploying technology. And therefore the Workshop which is a venture of the Nigeria Postal Services is in a position to propel the technological advancement of Nigeria. The need is for us to encourage our small and medium scale businesses by giving them the necessary tools. For instance, what does technology has to do with NIPOST Workshop? The truth of the matter is that the world is changing, our competitors who are having a free-day due to the fact that for sometime, our institution has been unable to match them would now be repositioned, re-engineered and strengthened by subscribing to global best practices. What do I mean by that? There is digitilisation and there is globalisation, all of these are anchored on the deployment of technology. So if you don’t want to be left behind. If you want to be part of the team that is chasing the money, you need to do what your competitors are doing. In fact, you need to do more than them. And that is the need of this workshop. And it wouldn’t have come at a better time when Nigeria is having challenges with the economy having relied so much on oil. Now that that era is obviously over, we need to put on our thinking cap, we need to use what God has given our people, the entrepreneurs, the young men and women out there. There is this issue that I want Nigerian to know-the demographic architecture of Nigeria consists of 65 per cent of the youths and approximately to put them at 70 million people. The 70million people we are talking about don’t know whether NIPOST exist neither do they patronise NIPOST at all. So the strategy we are going to deploy, and again for the fact that I am from the private sector, is to see how we can drive these 70million people to the POST and offer them services. There are entrepreneurs out there who are into various things. The first thing a business man/woman should do is to consider your cost. If you take the cost out of it, that would grow yourself and grow your company/profit. Now, tell me the national institution that has the reach, the network, the coverage, like NIPOST? These are some of the things that we are going to do. We are not limited to the workshop. The workshop will be the engine room, however we need to modernise what we do so that we can be competitive. If you use obsolete equipment of course it would amount to somebody who is being asked to run against Usain Bolt and is not putting on hi spike shoes. He/sh e would be defeated. That is why it is important for us to deploy technology and then subscribe to Information Communication Technology (ICT) and then internet penetration.
